


The Masterwork

by colonelmoran



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Farseer Trilogy - Robin Hobb, Jeeves - P. G. Wodehouse, Kingkiller Chronicles - Patrick Rothfuss, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, Winnie-the-Pooh - A. A. Milne
Genre: Crossover, Epic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-28
Packaged: 2018-07-18 21:40:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 45,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7331572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colonelmoran/pseuds/colonelmoran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When disparate worlds collide, characters are flung together in unexpected ways. But will they be able to save themselves from the looming danger that threatens to engulf all worlds and stories?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Old Wives' Tales

A Novel,

Combining the Literary Essences of

 

J.R.R Tolkien

Terry Pratchett

P.G. Wodehouse

Patrick Rothfuss

Robin Hobb

&

A.A. Milne

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

By

Colonel Moran (With Insincere Apologies)

 

  

 

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

_Old Wives’ Tales_

 

            It began with one of our trips to the Eolian. Kilvin had made good money selling off my newest batch of blue emitters, better than I deserved really since they were the first to hit the market since the disaster in the Fishery. As a result, I had some money for a change. I’d treated Wilem and Sim to tankards of cut-tail, or ‘scuten’ as Wilem called it. I myself drank only cider. I’d promised Count Threp I’d play his new song that evening and as usual I was secretly hoping to find Denna. Whichever came first, I’d want a clear head.

            “Bah, will you just look at those crebain,” grumbled Wilem. He was in a foul humor this evening, black as scuten. I hadn’t asked but I assumed this meant his battles in the constant turmoil of the Archives had not been going well.

            “Crebain?” I asked. The word was new to me. It didn’t sound particularly polite.

            “Those over there,” he said sourly, jerking his head toward the bar. Sim and I turned to follow the gesture.

            Seated at the bar were three women in tall black hats, pointed like the ones worn by arcanists according to a certain brand of bad Aturan play. I’d never seen anyone wearing one, let alone an arcanist. It was just hard to picture someone like Elxa Dal with a hat like that. But these three seemed to be born to it. Their hats were part of them, like a mountain’s peak is part of it, like an acorn cap, or a lion’s mane. It was hard to imagine these women _without_ their hats.

            The two older ones wore black dresses, not a showy raven black but a black that was worn but practical and confident in its purpose, much like the dresses' owners. Neither of them could have been less than fifty. The third couldn’t be more than fifteen. She had long brown hair and a grass green dress, but looked every bit as tough as her companions.

            “Crebain,” repeated Wilem, firmly.

            “What are crebain?” asked Simmon.

            “It is what farmers and the backwoods folk in the Cealdom call crows. But it is also their word for people like those. They know a little medicine, a lot of herb lore, a lot of gossip…gossip…that is your words for rumors, yes?”

            “That’s right,” assented Sim. I nodded.

            “A lot of gossip, maybe even a little sympathy. They help the villagers who feed and clothe them and put curses,” he drew an imaginary hex in the air, “on those who refuse.”

            “Magic curses are an old wives’ tale,” scoffed Simmon. “There’s no such thing.”

            “So they say,” said Wilem darkly.

            “Anyway, here in the Commonwealth we’d call them witches. Only the Tehlins burn anybody who calls themselves a witch,” Sim concluded.

            “Why do you call them crebain?” I asked.

            “Because they are big and black and if one starts hanging around it is because you are going to die,” answered Wilem, draining off the last of his scuten.

**~**

            “’T’aint proper wizardin’, that’s what I’m saying,” said Nanny Ogg. “Proper wizardin’ has great big balls of fire and dribbly candles and suchlike.”

            “And what would you know about it Gytha Ogg?” said Granny Weatherwax sternly. "Besides they’ve got lots of books. Everyone knows wizards use a lot of books.”

            "Yes, but they do a lot of medicine and smithin’ too, by the sound of it,” persisted Nanny. “You can’t tell me that’s proper wizardin’. Medicine's more our line of work and I’ve yet to hear tell of a wizard what wanted to get his hands dirty.”

            “Very respectable trade, smithin’,” said Granny Weatherwax. “Don’t see why wizards shouldn’t be allowed to learn trades, just because they’re wizards.”

            “But they don’t even call themselves wizards,” said Nanny Ogg stubbornly. “They calls themselves _arcanists_.”

            “Actually, most of them don’t,” said Tiffany, speaking for the first time in several minutes. She’d been watching the Eolian’s colorful crowd keenly, but now she continued, “Most of them call themselves ‘E’lir or ‘Re'lar’. Only the oldest ones get called arcanists.”

            “There you are,” said Granny Weatherwax triumphantly, “A hire-arky. That’s definitely a wizard thing.”

            “But some of them are women,” objected Tiffany.

            “And no better than they should be,” said Granny Weatherwax. “I don’t hold with enchantresses nor with Lettuce Earwig’s ‘magick’ neither.”

            “They don’t call it magic here, Esme,” said Nanny Ogg, “They calls it sympathy.”

            “Damn fool name for magic if you ask me,” growled Granny Weatherwax. Tiffany, who was remembering the feeling of being everywhere and everything, wasn’t so sure but she didn’t have the energy to argue. Nanny, sensing that the conversation was at an end, turned to the tall blonde man behind the bar.

            “Another cider for the young lady,” she said gesturing at Tiffany’s empty glass. “You, Esme?”

            “Water,” said Granny in a voice that made it clear that negotiation was out of the question. The man, whose name was Deoch, nodded politely.

            “And for yourself, Madame?” he asked Nanny Ogg.

            “Well it’s been a long time since we’s took a trip to foreign parts, and I’m sure I’ve never been here before in my life. What do folk drink around here, of an evening?” she asked with a friendly grin. Deoch returned the smile as he replied,

            “Why, lady, all of Imre knows there is no finer drink than metheglin. My partner Stanchion claims a man will come back from the dead for a taste of it.”

            “Cooee. Well I’ll have a cup of that then.”

Deoch smiled in approval and left to fetch the drinks.

**~**

            Something was bothering me. It was a prickle on my skin. Not the sort you get when someone’s watching you, but more like the feeling I’d get just before a performance or one of Elxa Dal’s duels: tension, like an over-tuned lute string. I eyed the room for something amiss.

            Nothing. The Eolian was crowded but no one else seemed to notice anything wrong. All eyes were on a young harper who was trying doggedly to win his pipes for the third time this month. No, not all eyes. The three women at the bar were not watching the harper. Their eyes were scanning the room, as if they too felt some unseen danger.

            The door burst inward with a splintering crash, like the sound of a lute dashed against hard cobbles. I was on my feet before I knew what was happening, one hand fumbling for my worthless folding knife. An icy blast of wind swept through the room, extinguishing lamps and candles so that the Eolian was lit now only by the dim ruby glow of the sympathy lamps around the stage. Into this eerie twilight stepped a tall figure, swathed in black so that no feature of his face could be seen. Silver moonlight from the open doorway played about his head and shoulders and glinted off the ring of metal upon his right forefinger. A chill ran up my spine and the feeling of tension increased so that the air felt thick and heavy, the way it does before a storm. I realized then, where I had felt this before. This man, or thing, gave me the same feeling as the Chandrian.

            I did not have long to ponder this revelation, for at that instant, the figure spoke. Its voice was a hiss, like the last breath of a dying man. It said,

            “I am looking for…Baggins.”

**~**


	2. Chapter 2

            “Jeeves,” I said as I sipped moodily at my morning tea and stared off into the distance, or at any rate off into as much distance as is afforded by a moderately sized London flat.

            “Yes sir?” replied Jeeves, bringing in the eggs and b.

            “As a rule, Jeeves, I try to avoid questioning the wisdom of an all wise Providence.”

            “Indeed sir?”

            “Indeed, Jeeves. But this morning I find myself questioning it a good deal,” I replied, spearing a forkful of scrambled eggs.

            “Might I inquire as to the nature of these theological ruminations, sir?”

            “You certainly may. I have been pondering…it is ponder is it not, Jeeves?”

            “Entirely correct, sir.”

            “Then I have pondering why an all wise providence would, having created the heavens and the earth, bother bunging in so many confounded aunts.”

            “Aunts, sir?”

            “Yes Jeeves, aunts. They are a scourge.”

            “Possibly your past experiences have served to prejudice you against the class.”

            “No Jeeves. This is not some fleeting bias. Since childhood up, I have suffered at the hands of these human locusts, and they continue to harry me even to this day,” I said, with righteous indignation.

            “I take it then, sir,” said Jeeves, “that your interview with Lady Spencer-Gregson was less than satisfactory?”

            “That is not putting it all too strongly, Jeeves,” I said, with R.I. as before. “She says she wants me to marry that Vestrit girl."

            “Mazeltov, sir.”

            “Bless you, Jeeves. Do you need a handkerchief?”

            “No, thank you sir. I did not, in fact, sneeze.”

            “You didn’t? Then what was that noise?”

            “Mazeltov, sir. It is a Yiddish expression for conveying wishes of good fortune to one entering the matrimonial state.”

            “Oh. I see. But look here, Jeeves, dash it all, I don’t want to enter the matrimonial state.”

            “No sir?”

            “No Jeeves. I suppose these Traders are alright in their way but the idea of being bound to them in bonds of holy wedlock gives me the absolute pip.”

            “I can readily imagine, sir. While such a union would undoubtedly offer certain financial advantages, the family seems decidedly provincial.”

            “Piratical is more like it Jeeves.”

            “I understand that Captain Vestrit is a model of commercial probity, sir.”

            “Possibly Jeeves, but the girl seems to have a disposition that’s a short saunter away from an alley cat.”

            “Indeed sir. Might I suggest that we vacate London for a few weeks?”

            “Do a bolt?”

            “Precisely sir. I do not believe that the Captain intends to remain in the city long.”

            “I see, Jeeves,” I said, nibbling thoughtfully at the last slice of bacon. “Do you think it would work?”

            “I imagine so, sir. I understand, however, that her Ladyship has taken the precaution of offering the staffs of the London train stations and shipping companies a substantial reward for information regarding your movements.”

            I sat bolt upright in my armchair and let out a startled, “Golly!”

            “Precisely sir.”

            “But this is frightful, Jeeves!” I exclaimed. “I shan’t be able to get away. Not out of the country anyway, and I doubt anywhere else will be enough to keep Aunt Agatha at bay!” (Aunt Agatha, if you remember, is my least deserving aunt, the one who files her teeth into points and bays at the full moon.)

            “I appreciate the difficulty, sir. Under the circumstances, I would advocate a stay in Ankh-Morpork. My uncle Willikins, if you recall, is butler to his Grace the Duke of Ankh.”

            I blinked for a moment, nonplused.

            “But Jeeves, how on earth can we get there?”

            “In the automobile, sir.”

            “Jeeves, you’re gibbering. The two-seater won’t cross oceans.”

            “Ankh-Morpork is a curious city, sir. With your permission, sir, I will begin to pack your effects. I have already laid out our sturdy heather-mixture tweeds, suitable for traveling, in the bedroom, sir.”

            I suppose other fellows might quite possibly pulled the heavy employer at this point, demanding reasonable explanations and so on. But so sedulously had I been conditioned over the years to rely upon Jeeves’ lightest word, that I “right ho’d” without a murmur. I dressed myself in the traveling clothes, while Jeeves bustled about with suitcases and walking sticks and so on, and in perhaps six or seven shakes of a duck’s tail, we were ready to depart.

            I glanced around the flat in a brooding sort of way and as an afterthought plucked my new hat from the hat stand and placed it upon my head, at an angle somewhere between jaunty and rakish.

            This hat was a recent addition to the Wooster home, a fetching forest green number with a red and gold hatband. I’d avoided wearing it around town 'til now, as I strongly suspected that it would not make a hit with Jeeves. But I retained a faint hope that it might pass muster for road attire.

            At the look Jeeves gave the hat as he entered the car, that hope died. It was a cold, disapproving sort of look, the sort of look Moses might have given an Israelite he’d discovering complaining about the flavor his manna.

            “Excuse me, sir,” he said, registering chilliness and reproach, “But it appears that you have inadvertently left the house wearing some other gentleman’s hat.”

            “No Jeeves,” I said, attempting to inject a drop of hauteur into my voice but finding that the stuff was backordered. “This hat is mine. Don’t you like it?”

            “No sir.”

            “Well why the dickens not?” I said heatedly.

            “The combination of colors is less that fortunate, sir. The result is somewhat garish, if I may say so.”

            “Garish, Jeeves? You use strong words.”

            “Perhaps sir, but I feel they are accurate ones.”

            I writhed pretty freely beneath the thrust. I liked the hat and Jeeves’ words had wounded me deeply. I briefly considered coming back at him with a pretty cutting retort, but decided against it, as I couldn’t think of one. Instead I gave Jeeves the cold and imperious eye and started the car.

            We had been driving for some time, I couldn’t say how long precisely, but long enough for me to whistle the choruses (invariably the only part of the bally song I can remember) of such substantial hits as “Sky Blue Pink”, “Dear Marjorie”, “Across the River,” and “My Country Lass Left Me for the Man Who Drive the Guinness Truck, Oh Yes,” when Jeeves directed me to turn the automobile off the main road and on to a dirt lane or track of sorts. It meandered through fields and past copses, complete with cows, songbirds, and all the fixings.

            “I say Jeeves, what’s that?”

            We were approaching a sort of stone archway that overhung the road.

            “It is a trilithon, sir.”

            “Really? I thought those were a longish sort of race.”

            “No sir.”

            “Ah well. I suppose you’re right. The bally thing looks like the long lost child of Stonehenge.”

            “A very colorful image, sir.”

            “Thank you Jeeves.”

            And without further ado, we drove under this trilithon and toodled on our merry way.

**~**


	3. Chapter III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Pooh and Piglet Meet a Strange Traveler and Fall Into Danger…

One fine day, Pooh and Piglet were walking through the forest, talking in friendly way about nothing in particular. Sometimes Piglet would ask, “I wonder if…” and Pooh would answer “Oh certainly, Piglet. I quite agree…” And other times Pooh would say, “I think perhaps…” and Piglet would reply, “Of course, Pooh, so do I.” It was a pleasant enough way to spend a sleepy Summer morning.

            It was just as Pooh was becoming aware of a hollow feeling, the sort you got if you hadn’t eaten in an hour or two, that they happened upon a little clearing between three sycamores. The Sun was peeping down between the leaves and whirling seeds and in the clearing’s center sat a Someone.

            He, or perhaps she, was shaped like Christopher Robin, but taller. His hair was the color of condensed milk. So were his eyes. So was his skin. He wore old walking boots and a tattered woolen cloak. His shirt was made of little diamonds of cloth, all black and white. Next to him lay a large travel sack with many pockets and a stout walking stick. In his hands he held a little silver knife and a block of wood, which he was whittling.

            “Who is it?” asked Piglet, a little nervous.

            “I don’t know,” said Pooh. “Let’s ask him.” He started across the clearing

            Piglet was not so certain that this was a Good Plan, but he followed Pooh, making a little “hrem, hrem” noise at the back of his throat.

            The Someone looked up.

            “Hello,” said Pooh.

            “Hello,” said the Someone.

            “Hello,” said Pooh, just to make certain.

            “Hello,” said the Someone, smiling. Pooh started to say “hello” again but decided that he’d better not. Instead, he asked,

            “Who are you?”

            “Myself,” said the Someone.

            Pooh nodded. “So am I.”

            “Me too,” squeaked Piglet.

            The Someone smiled wider. He had a kind smile. “That’s good to hear. Is there something special I should call you?”

            “Pooh,” said Pooh.

            “Piglet,” said Piglet.

            “Wonderful,” said the Someone. “You may call me Fool.”

            “Fool?” asked Pooh.

            “Yes, Pooh?”

            “What’s that you’re carving?”

            “A piece of a dream,” he said with a wink. “May I ask a question?”

            “Alright,” said Pooh.

            “Where are we?”

            “Here,” said Pooh. This made Fool laugh. It was a wonderful sound, like the gurgle of a Spring river.

            “And where is here, wise master Bear?” he asked, but it was Piglet who answered.

            “The Hundred-Acre Wood.”

            “Hmm. What time is it?”

            “Now,” replied Piglet. Fool chuckled. Pooh’s tummy rumbled.

            “I think it must be almost eleven o’clock,” Pooh said. “I don’t suppose you’d care for a smackerel of something?”

            “I’d love to,” said Fool and stood up, tucking his carving away.

            So the three of them went to Pooh and Piglet’s house.

            “Why does is say ‘SANDER’S’ over your door?” asked Fool.

            “Does it?” asked Pooh, surprised.

            “It does,” said Piglet. He had gone to school once or twice by pocket and was more comfortable with letters than was Pooh.

            “Oh,” said Pooh. He liked the gold letters and had always supposed that they read, “The House of Pooh Bear,” or something of that sort. Finding that they did not was Disconcerting.

            “Perhaps,” suggested Piglet, “It used to be the name of someone who lived in this house. There was a sign by my old house in the oak tree that said ‘TRESPASSERS W-‘”.

            “Why did it say that?” asked Fool. Piglet explained that it was his grandfather’s name and had been short for Trespassers Will, which was short for Trespassers William.

            “Maybe you had a grandfather called Sanders,” said Piglet to Pooh. Pooh rather liked the idea of having a grandfather and he began to feel better.

            They went inside and Pooh went to the larder. He stood on a chair and took down a big jar. On this jar was written “HUNNY”, but it had been crossed out in pencil and above it in Piglet’s neater hand was “Honney.” Piglet fetched a basket of haycorns and since this was a Special Occasion, they got out a little pot of marmalade as well.

**~**

            Four grey figures hovered above the forest. They looked, as much as looked like anything, like empty grey robes. What they actually were is quite difficult to describe. The word cherub would be a great deal too jolly and rosy-cheeked. There was something serious about these four, almost sinister.

            One said, Is it not cruel? The words were not spoken nor precisely thought. Reality simply shifted so that they had been uttered.

            One said, No. Cruelty does not exist.

            One said, The mortals believe it does.

            One said, They are deluded.

            One said, It does not matter. It is necessary.

            One said, Does necessity exist?

            One said, We are uncertain.

            One said, That is unacceptable. We must be certain. We are certainty.

            One said, We are necessity also.

            One said, And Cruelty?

            And one said, Yes. We are that as well.

**~**

            Now the “Honney” jar was very nearly empty and Pooh Bear was nearly full. Fool licked a drop of honey from his long fingers and smiled. Pooh smiled too. It was good honey.

            “They say that hunger is the best sauce,” said Fool.

            “They do?” said Pooh, surprised. Fool nodded.

            “They do. But I disagree. Nostalgia is a far better sauce. Hunger may enhance flavor but it encourages one to eat too quickly. Nostalgia not only sweetens a dish, but encourages the eater to savor it.

            “I see,” said Pooh, who didn’t. Fool went on; he seemed almost to be speaking to himself.

            “There was a woman in Buckeep town who kept bees. She kept them mostly for wax of course, but she would sell the honey too. It was dark and raw and sweet, rather like the woman. But too much honey never gives worse than a toothache, while this woman broke a man’s heart.”

            Pooh didn’t know what to make of this. It sounded like a riddle, but Fool seemed sad about it. Pooh put his paw on Fool’s hand and Piglet patted him on the shoulder. It seemed the Right Thing To Do.

            Then Pooh’s nose caught an odd smell. It was like smoke, but it was coming from outside instead from the fireplace.

            “Do you smell that?” he asked Piglet. Piglet sniffed the air.

            “I do, Pooh. It smells like smoke.” He made nervous sort of grunting noise. Pooh nodded and went over to the door, the others following, and opened it.

            Grey ashes blew in through the door and stuck to the carpet. Pooh didn’t notice. The forest was On Fire.

            Hungry red and gold flames leapt from tree to tree, roaring and crackling. Burning branches dropped to the ground with a crash; sparks fell like a steady rain.

            Pooh gasped and Piglet gave a high-pitched squeal of terror, but Fool stared at the sky.

            “What are they?” he moaned. “They kill the paths. When I look at them, the lines vanish, the futures die. El and Eda, what are they?”

            And Pooh saw that overhead four grey shapes circled like vultures. Fool clutched at the door to stop himself from sinking to the ground.

            “They’re killing this place! Why? Gods above, why? What are they? We’ve got to get away. We’ve got to get away!”

**~**


	4. Chapter 4

Sam Vimes sharpened his grandfather’s cutthroat razor with a few deft strokes of the whetstone, lathered his face and chin, and began to make himself presentable to the civilized world, or at least the Morporkian equivalent.

            “Well Willikins, any news today?”

            Willikins, Vimes’ butler, stood at a respectful distance from his employer, and his employer’s razor, holding a copy of the day’s newspaper.

            “Yes sir,” said Willikins.

            “You know, Willikins,” said Vimes, “It seems like something newsworthy happens every day of the week. 'Course, Mr. de Worde would be out of a job if it didn’t, right?”

            “Very true, sir,” intoned Willikins.

            “Oh go on man. Let's hear what the Times thinks we ought to think.”

            “It seems that his Lordship has officially initiated work on his network of underground chambers, sir.”

            “Yes, the Undertaking. He asked me to send down a couple of lads for the ceremony, but I told him that I needed my coppers doing real work.”

            “A laudable attitude, sir,” said Willikins, without inflection. Vimes snorted.

            “Anything else, Willikins?”

            “Protesters of his Lordship’s plans assembled outside the Palace, sir. There were quite a few of them it seems. They’re calling it the Undermining, sir. The claim it is a violation of the right to private property.”

            “They would,” said Vimes, as he negotiated the difficult spot under the nose. “But that won’t stop Vetinari.”

            “No sir,” agreed Willikins. A strangled scream cut through the house’s morning stillness. Vimes did not flinch.[1]

            “Ah Willikins. I imagine one of Lord Downey’s trainee assassins has just discovered the trapped rainwater tank.”

            “The one with the Agatean piranhas, sir?”

            “The very same. Run along and see if he’s still with us, won’t you?”

            “Right away sir.”

            Vimes finished shaving, dressed himself, gulped a hasty breakfast, gave young Sam a hug, kissed Sybil, and caught a fast coach to Psuedopolis Yard.

            As usual, the place was bustling. Pigeons with messages fluttered to and from the loft and the building’s Clacks tower thumped and rattled away. The late night watch were streaming away from the station in ones and twos, looking tired but faintly proud, the look of coppers who’d survived another night.

            Sergeant Shoe was on duty at the front desk when Vimes walked in. The salute he gave Vimes was a bit on the stiff side but on the whole, not too bad for a zombie.

            “Morning Reg,” said Vimes.

            “Morning Mister Vimes,” said Reg, creakily. “Carrot’s waiting for you in your office, sir.”

            “What? Why?” asked Vimes. “He and Angua were running night watch, weren’t they? He should be getting some sleep.”

            “Couldn’t say, sir,” said Reg, who didn’t sleep. “Someone killed Andy Jingler last night though, sir. Bad business.”

            “Andy Jingler? The treasurer for the Beggar’s Guild? But no one attacks the Beggars.”

            “Someone did,” said Reg darkly. “Carrot’s worried, sir. You’d better talk to him.”

            “Thanks Reg,” said Vimes. He fetched himself a cup of thick black coffee from the watch cantina and went up to his office. It was less cluttered in here these days, since Vimes had started sending the paperwork to Corporal A.E. Pecimal, but “neat” was still not a word that could honestly be applied to the room. Captain Carrot Ironfoundersson was staring meditatively out of the open window when Vimes entered, but at the sound of his footsteps, Carrot turned and saluted smartly. As always, his worn Watch mail gleamed with polish, but there dark circles under his bright blue eyes.

            “Good morning, sir,” said Carrot.

            “Good grief man. You look dead on your feet. Sit down.”

            “Thank-you sir,” said Carrot impassively, but sank onto the proffered the chair nonetheless. Vimes seated himself at his desk and took a long sip of coffee.

            “Alright Carrot. Tell me what happened.”

            “Corporal Nobbs and Corporal Haddock were on patrol last night, when a couple of Guild Beggars came rushing over to say there’d been a murder. Haddock went with them and Nobby came back to the yard for help. I sent Angua and Constable Dorfl over sir, because, well sir, anyone who’d attack the Beggars sir, well…”

            “I understand, Carrot,” said Vimes. “What happened then?”

            “They found poor Mr. Jingler, sir. Igor’s got him on the slab down in the cold room. It was a bit of a mess, I’m afraid. Stabbed in the ribs five times and a good sized chunk bitten out of his right arm.”

            “Bitten? Out of his arm?”

            “Yes sir. Angua managed to get a scent though, even through all the blood. She tracked it to an old building on Ratcatcher Street, sir.”

            Vimes nodded. Ratcatcher Street had never been one of Ankh-Morpork’s high rent neighborhoods but after the failure of the Ratcatcher’s Guild the place was one of the city’s worst slums. And Ankh-Morpork had a fine tradition of terrible slums.

            “There were three of them in the house, sir. Angua says they didn’t cooperate though; they didn’t even seem to recognize each other, not as people. The house was filthy, Angua says, full of blood, and dirt, and rotting food. One of them had Mr. Jingler’s cashbox, sir. And his boots. She had blood all over her face, sir. They brought her back to the cells, and the other two. They’re not right in the head, sir.”

            Vimes groaned. “We don’t need another insanity case, Captain. The Times is still giving us grief about that man Steeples.” Gods but that had been a grisly case.

            Carrot shook his head. “They aren’t mad, sir. I’ve talked with them. So has Igor and he agrees. They aren’t delusional or manic. Something’s been drained out of them. They can’t care about anything beyond what they want right now. The woman’s married, sir, has two children. She remembers them but she doesn’t care anymore. I can’t even get them to keep their cells neat. Even animals know better than to fill their space with filth, sir.”

            It was a warm day, but Vimes shivered slightly. “Is it magic?”

            “Couldn’t say, sir. But it’s bad. They shook Angua up and you know that takes a lot, sir. She’s resting now.” Vimes noted that, as always, Carrot’s formal tone softened just a bit as he spoke of Angua.

            “All three the same?” asked Vimes.

            “Yes sir.”

            “It’s not catching, is it?”

            “Igor doesn’t think so, sir. The Beggar’s Guild reported rumors of others though, in the Shades and down by the river.”

            “I’ll get some squads to go sort them out,” said Vimes. “Corporal Ringfounder’s been wanting some action and Washpot knows all the street people.”

            “A good idea, sir,” agreed Carrot. Vimes nodded, turning his official rosewood baton over and over in his hands.

            “We need to get to the bottom of this, Carrot, and soon. This sort of thing scares people and we need a frightened city like we need a half-brick smashed through our temples.” Carrot nodded.

            “Get some sleep, Captain. I’m putting you in charge of this investigation. Take Angua with you of course. And Constable Von Humperding.”

            “I’d like to take Dorfl too, sir, if it’s all the same. We’ll need him to take these people alive. Besides he’s the strongest…er, man, on our payroll and I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

            Vimes nodded his assent and began to draw up the paperwork. “By all means Captain, take Dorfl.” _I’ve got a bad feeling about this too._

**~**

 

 

 

[1] Which was fortunate, as he would have most likely earned himself the nickname Sir Samuel “Nose-less” Vimes.


	5. Like Smoke

The thing stood in the doorway, cold night air and bowel-knotting fear billowing in with it. The patrons of the Eolian drew back from it. Nobody answered its strange demand. The terror was more than ordinary. It was coming from the thing, pouring off it like smoke. I plunged my mind deep into the Heart of Stone, banishing all emotion. Beside me I could hear Simmon whimper once, softly, and Wilem praying in low, rapid Siaru.

            “Baggins…” hissed the black clad figure, as it advanced into the taproom. “Where is Baggins?”

            “We’ve no one by that name here,” Deoch called across the darkened room. The powerfully muscled man had pulled his heavy oak drunk-thumper out from behind the bar and was slowly edging in front of Stanchion.

            The creature let out a low, keening noise, full of rage and tinged with despair. Slowly and deliberately, it drew the longsword that hung from the scabbard at its hip. The weapon looked ancient and deadly. Deoch froze.

            “Baggins…” it hissed again, more urgently. In a few seconds, someone was going to die. I needed to do something. My knife was useless. The torches had blown out, but the big hearth still smoldered. The red and grey coals would be hot enough to melt cutlery, but I had no link to the stranger, nothing to bind him to, nowhere to send the heat.

            Without a plan, I nevertheless found myself easing slowly forward, fingers curling around the empty stone tankard that had held Wilem’s scuten, ready to throw.

**~**

            “Oh bugger,” said Nanny Ogg, but she said it quietly. Tiffany followed her gaze, past the black clad monster menacing the bar patrons with a palely glowing sword, to the red-haired young man edging out from behind his table in the corner. He had a heavy stone tankard in one hand.

            “Idiot,” moaned Tiffany. “He has to go and be a bloody hero.”

            “Bloody corpse is going to be more like it,” Nanny replied. Her deft, wrinkled fingers dipped into her black knit bag, pulling forth string and pins and beads. “Where’s Greebo got to?”

            “We’ve got to do something,” said Tiffany, urgently. Her own fingers found the silver horse about her throat. The feel of the cool metal calmed her a little, bringing her mind back to the day she’d gotten it, on the green hills of the Chalk. She wished that the Feegles were here.

            “Reckon you’re right, girl,” said Granny Weatherwax. “It’ll be getting ‘involved’ but there’s no help for that now.”

            Granny Weatherwax stood up and walked briskly across the taproom. People drew back from her as she passed. They always did, Tiffany had noticed, when she wanted them to. It was like the I’m-not-here trick turned inside out.

            Now Granny stood alone in the empty space before the doorway, the terrified crowd bunched up behind her like the audience at a play. The dark figure loomed in front of her, its sword still drawn.

            “Baggins…” it hissed.

            “I don’t know no Baggins,” said Granny coolly. “But my name’s Mistress Weatherwax and I think it’s time you were leaving.”

            Tiffany saw that the red-haired young man had frozen where he stood. The creature let out a low rattling noise. Tiffany shivered as she realized that it was laughter.

            “I am a servant of the Dark Lord,” it said. “I go where I will, beholden to none, old woman.”

            “Behold this, cleverclogs,” snapped Granny, and the thing went up in flames. White hot and hungry, they seemed to coil out from the thing’s core, bursting from its sleeves and the hood of its cowl, before licking back upon themselves to consume it utterly. It staggered towards the door, folds of night black cloth falling into grey ashes, mail gauntlets and greaves reduced to twisted chunks of charred metal, before collapsing.

            Its dropped sword clanged against the flagstones with a dull finality. Behind Granny, the big fire in the Eolian’s hearth had gone out. The ashes would be cold to the touch.

**~**

            I was stunned. Not so much by what the woman had done, though it would have taken a very skilled sympathist to move the heat of hearth fire as efficiently as she appeared to have done, but by how she had done it. She’d recited no binding, she’d had no link, she hadn’t even called the fire’s name. She’d simply pulled the heat of the fire out and sent into the thing. It might look like sympathy, but I was sure that this was another kind of magic entirely.

            “All right, show’s over,” said Deoch. His voice was loud and commanding, but I heard a slight tremor in it. “You’d best run along home now. We’re closed!”

            As the Eolian’s shaken patrons poured out of the building like smoke, I turned to Wilem and Sim.

            “Damn crebain,” said Wilem. It seemed to be an automatic response, without any reference to his actual train of thought. He looked pale and shaken.

            “You two should go back to the University,” I said. “Tell the Masters what happened. They need to know, and quickly too, before the story can get too garbled.” Wil still seemed lost but Simmon nodded.

            “Charred body of God…I don’t want to think about what the Constables are going to do when they find out.”

            “Move fast and stick together,” I cautioned. “We don’t know what else is out there.”

            I waved a hand in the direction of the dark stranger’s twisted remains. Sim stood and started to make for the door but Wilem stopped him with a shake of his head.

            “Wait…Kvothe, you are telling us to go to the University. Well and good. But what is it that you are going to do? You have that look in your eyes, the one you wear when you are plotting.”

            I gave a shrug that I hoped was nonchalant. “I’m going to stay here and see what I can find out from those three. If they’re hedge witches like you said, I figure they’re more likely to open up to a curious Ruh scamp than to someone who looks like an authority figure.”

            “I suppose that makes sense,” said Simmon. Wilem frowned.

            “I like it not. Such ones are dangerous.”

            “I’ll be careful,” I assured him.

            “Careful for you is never careful enough. But I see no better option,” Wilem sighed and began to move towards the door. “Just remember Kvothe, should you get yourself killed, Simmon and I will be very displeased with you.”

            As soon as they had gone, I made my way towards the three women in the pointed black hats. The exiting musicians and pleasure seekers had given them a wide berth, particularly as they stood close to the charred remains of the thing that the tall woman had burned. The shortest of them, who had a face like a wizened, jovial apple, now held a strange creation suspended from her fingers.

            It was woven out of bits of string and bootlace, with beads, hairpins, a champagne cork, a silver spoon, a hazel twig, and a hand painted wooden clog suspended in it. At its center hung a live mouse eating a piece of cheese. It looked like the world’s strangest dream catcher and it spun oddly as she stirred her fingers. The spoon almost appeared to pass through the clog and the hairpins seemed to leap from string to string. All three of the women were studying it intently.

           “Excuse me,” I ventured, not wanting to interrupt.

            “And who might you be, young man?” said the woman who had burned the black-clad figure, sharply. Up close I could see that she wasn’t particularly tall, but she carried herself as though she were. Her eyes were blue and piercing, set in a face like a hatchet.

            “Kvothe,” I said automatically. I hadn’t really meant to use my actual name but something in the woman’s voice had yanked the truth from my lips.

            “Please mistress, what was that thing you killed?”

            “I ain’t sure what it was,” she said brusquely, glancing back down at the tangle of strings. “Something dark. But it ain’t dead, not really. I’ve just broken its rag-doll, that’s all.”

            “There’s something funny going on Esme,” said the witch holding the odd device. “Something big.”

            “Greebo’s back,” commented the girl in the green dress. She had big brown eyes and was quite pretty, in a down to earth sort of way. I followed her gaze to an evil-looking grey tomcat with one blind eye, which was twining itself about the short witch’s legs. The young witch spoke again.

            “Granny, where’s You? Because I think we’d better get going. I didn’t get the feeling they like witches around here very much.”

            “You will be out with the brooms,” asserted the tall witch. “Ready Gytha?” she asked the short witch.

            “Ready as an April virgin,” answered her companion with an earthy chuckle, tucking away the strange cat’s cradle.

            “Wait!” I cried, as they started towards the door. “Could you teach me how you killed that thing, how you moved the fire without a binding?”

            The tall one, Mistress Weatherwax, turned to look at me.

            “Mayhap I could, if I had the time and I wanted to. But I ain’t and I don’t.” And with that she strode from the tavern.

            I ran after them. They’d found three broomsticks leaning against the side of the building and were mounting them like children ride hobbyhorses. A sleek white cat had settled itself around Mistress Weatherwax’s shoulders.

            “Please, wait!” I called again. The youngest one turned to me and gave me the strangest smile.

            Then the brooms flew. I know it sounds like a foolish folksinger’s tale, but they actually flew. Not like birds, but more like flying insects, swift and precise. And in a breath, all three were gone.

            I stalked back inside the Eolian. I’ve been described as ‘strong-willed’ by my flatterers and ‘mule-headed’ by my friends, but I’ve never been one to take no for an answer. I filled a burlap sack with bread, hard cheese, and carrots from the Eolian’s stores. Then I tied it to my lute case, and strapped the lute case to my back. I made sure I had a full water skin and some sympathy wax, tipped some coins onto the counter for Deoch and Stanchion, and headed for the door. The witches had been flying north. They would have to touch down eventually, and I guessed that it would be sooner rather than later. The night was chilly and the air gets colder the higher you go.

            That’s when I saw the sword the thing had dropped. It was a cruel weapon: cold, ancient, and evil. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave it behind. As I’ve said, I don’t always exercise the best judgment. Since I had no scabbard, I settled for wrapping the thing in sackcloth and tying it to my belt. Thus armed, I set off into the night, chasing the secret magics of the witch queens.

**~**


	6. Chapter 6

I was slightly apprehensive as we toodled along, not quite nervous perhaps, merely a shade discomfited. We’d left the grassy English countryside behind us, passed through a goodish quantity of rolling purple moorland, and were now climbing our way slowly into the rocky foothills of a looming mountain range. The two-seater chugged along faithfully but I could see that the steep going was taking it out of the old charger. I began to wonder what would happen if we ran out of petrol up here.

            I glanced over at Jeeves. His expression was stoic and intrepid, not unlike that of a stuffed dugong I remember seeing at the Royal Museum of Natural History during my boyhood, but years of living in close association with the man enabled me to discern that while not actually yet discomfited, he was far from being comfited.

            “How much farther would you say the drive was, Jeeves?” I inquired nonchalantly.

            “I would estimate that we have traversed a little more than half the requisite distance, sir. We are now in the lower Ramtops.”

            “Bit of a gloomy looking spot, wot?”

            “The area has a decidedly forbidding aspect, sir.”

            It was at this juncture that a black fletched arrow came zipping out of a cleft in the rocky hillside and perforated our front tire.

**~**

            Uglúk called a halt in the shadow of a tall hill, studded with broken stones. He was sniffing the air with his broad, flat nose. Other Orcs hastened to imitate him.

            “The air is wrong,” Uglúk said. Pippin glanced over at Merry, as they lay huddled against a boulder. Neither could fathom the Orc’s meaning.

            “So we’re lost?” Grishnákh asked, belligerently.

            “We are the Uruk-hai!” snarled Uglúk. “We are never lost.”

            “Where are we going then?” hissed the goblin, long fingers creeping towards the hilt of his scimitar.

            “To the tower of the White Hand. Unless you mountain maggots want to crawl back to your holes.”

            “I will see the prisoners delivered,” said Grishnákh, darkly.

            “Good,” replied Uglúk, giving the goblin a broad smile that showed his pointed teeth, “Now pick up the haflings, you scum, and let’s…” He broke off mid-sentence, sniffing the air once more.

            “What is it?” demanded Grishnákh.

            “Man flesh,” barked Uglúk. “Coming up the path. Not the horse-boys; these have a machine with them.” Pippin wondered what kind of machine could be carried into the mountains.

            “What’s the plan, chief?” hissed one of the other Orcs.

            “We kill them,” said Uglúk with a snarl.

            The Orcs quickly took cover on the far side of the stony rise. The Isengarders took up position behind the jutting boulders to better be able to fire upon anyone who appeared on the path. Grishnákh and the northerners, who were more lightly armored, would rush out swiftly and surround the travelers. The hobbits were left bound and stashed close beside Uglúk.

            A few moments later the hobbits heard a distant rumbling, like cartwheels mixed with a mechanical whirring. The noises grew louder and Pippin guessed that the men and their mysterious machine were drawing near to the Orc’s ambush. Neither he nor Merry could see the road any longer.

            All at once, Uglúk cried, “Now!” and he and the other Isengarders sent a hail of black arrows down into the pass. The northern Orcs surged forward, yelling and brandishing their crude weapons, and for a time all sense was lost in the din of battle.

**~**

            I don’t know if you have ever been shot at before. It is my understanding that, despite what the newspapers keep reporting about the rising rates of violent crime, most people actually haven’t. If, however, you are one of the unlucky minority who has, you will bear me out when I say that the experience is an unpleasant one, unnerving and jarring in the extreme.

            More arrows thudded down around us as from the rocks sprang a number of bow-legged chappies, with scarred and swarthy faces and long apish arms. They were waving a variety of sharp implements in a manner that was far from cordial. The two-seater, now resembling nothing so much as a large, automobile-shaped pincushion and totally beyond my control, plowed headlong into a number of these axe-brandishing ne’er-do-wells, increasing the statistics for rural automobile casualties by a goodish bit, before it gave up and flopped over on its side, spilling the Wooster luggage, valet, and person onto the ground.

            I huddled in the shelter of the up-turned vehicle as a second wave of arrows fell around us and turned my ashen face to Jeeves.

            “I say, Jeeves! This is a bit thick.”

            “Unquestionable so, sir.”

            “But what are we to do, Jeeves? Those bounders will have us surrounded in another two ticks.”

            “Under the circumstances,” said Jeeves, again displaying a strain of unflappable stoicism reminiscent of the late dugong, “I would advocate an energetic mêlée assault, sir.”

            “Rush at them, you mean?”

            “Just so, sir. I feel convinced that the archers will be reluctant to fire at us for fear of striking their own troops and we will, if you will pardon the cliché sir, have the element of surprise.”

            Well, put like that it sounded pretty good and it wasn’t as if I had a real range of options. Glancing around the veritable jambalaya of my scattered effects, I spotted my stout cane, the one with the brass knob made to look like the head of a philosophic waterfowl, and lying beside it my certified gold-standard Greensweeps™ putter. I snatched up both of the blunt instruments and commended my soul to God. Jeeves, for his part, had caught up a sturdy black umbrella and was pulling from his pocket a small, but serviceable, rubber bludgeon. I had seen this bludgeon, or cosh, relic of testing stay at Deverill Hall, at work before and knew of its virtuosity. The sight of it put steel into the Wooster spine.

            “Ready, Jeeves?” I asked.

            “Yes sir.”

            “Then up and at 'em!”

            We burst out from behind the stricken vehicle like a pheasants’ revolution. I dealt the first blighter I came to a healthy whack between the eyes with the Greensweeps™ before he quite knew what was happening, and he went down like a ton of coals. One of his chums came at me with a battle-axe but I knocked the weapon aside with my cane and whipped the brass waterfowl around to connect with his jaw. He let out a noise like a stricken soda-water siphon and folded up at the knees. I sprang nimbly over his prone form in time to catch the next chappie’s scimitar sweep with the inside edge of my putter. I disarmed him with a lazy flick of the wrist and proceeded to bean him on the bonce with my stick.

            After that, things get a bit hazy. I’ve noticed the same thing about conversations with my aunt Agatha. Jeeves tells me this is due to the brain’s ability to suppress traumatic experiences. I’m not quite sure what he means but he is almost certainly correct. I remember seeing Jeeves laying about himself, left and right, getting good value out of the umbrella’s reach and coshing any bounder who got too close, and I remember one of the creatures getting close enough so his sword stroke cut a nasty gash into my heather-mixture tweeds, but beyond that it’s all a sort of blur.

            Next thing I knew, I was charging up the stony hill, bellowing the ancient war cry of the Woosters. A couple of big blighters in armor still held the ridge. They had white hands painted on their helmets and they held short, heavy swords. It seemed like they were guarding something. I fell upon them with wild blows but they were ready for it and I was forced to scramble backward, with them advancing after me. In another half-jiffy it seemed to me that the last of the Woosters was going to snuff it.

            But just as I was steeling myself to meet my Maker, along rolled Jeeves. Waiting for the psychological moment, he stepped out from behind a boulder and opened the umbrella in the creatures’ faces, startling them not a little. They tried to leap backwards. I don’t blame them mind you, I’d have done the same thing in their place, but all the same you can’t leap backwards on steep mountain slopes while wearing heavy armor without coming a pretty fearful pearler. And a pretty fearful pearler is precisely what these bounders came. And once they were down, of course, it was all over but the screaming.

            “Jeeves,” I panted as he turned to me, umbrella dark with blood, “You truly dislike that hat?”

            “I fear so, sir.”

            “Burn it, Jeeves.”

            “Thank you, sir. I shall attend to it at my earliest convenience.”

            This having been satisfactorily settled, I did my best to assess the situation. The enemy were slain or fled. The two-seater was a lost cause and my jacket was cut to ribbons. Then my eye fell upon a shape behind the ridge that the big fellows had been defending. I moved over and discovered two children, bound and gagged. At least, I’d assumed they were children, because of their size. A closer inspection revealed them to be more solidly built and in need of a shave. Their feet too were covered in curly hair. Operating on the principle that the friend of my enemy is my enemy, or rather the other way round, I produced a penknife and cut their bonds.

            “And who are you chaps?” I asked, as they chaffed the stiffness from their limbs.

            “I am Merriadock Brandybuck,” said the one who looked to be the elder.

            “And I’m Peregrine Took,” added the other. “We’re hobbits of the Shire.”

            “And we’re both very grateful for the rescue,” said Merriadock.

            “Don’t mention it,” I said with a careless wave of the hand. “What will you do now?”

            “Try to get home, I suppose, since I don’t think we’ll ever be able to find the rest of our party.”

            “I say,” I said, feeling oddly protective, “These mountains aren’t exactly safe. What do you say you come along with us? We’re bound for Ankh-Morpork. They say all roads lead away from it. We can try and get you home from there.”

            Peregrine glanced over at Merriadock, who nodded.

            “We’d be glad to go with you.”

            “Splendid,” I said and turned to Jeeves. He was standing some yards away, cleaning the point of his umbrella.

            “Yes sir?”

            “Mr. Took and Mr. Brandybuck will be accompanying us Ankh-Morpork, Jeeves.”

            “Very good, sir.”

**~**


	7. Chapter VII

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which We Witness an Escape and Encounter a Heffalump...

“There’s a river, yes?” said Fool as he pulled Pooh and Piglet back into the temporary shelter of the house.

            “Y-yes,” said Piglet, eyes wide with fear.

            “Down past the Six Pine Trees,” added Pooh.

            “Can you swim?” asked Fool. “We need to get out of here.”

            Pooh thought about Roo swirling down the little stream by the North Pole.

            “No,” he decided. Fool sighed.

            “Do you have a boat then?” he asked, beginning to look a little wild around the eyes. Pooh started to shake his head, but Piglet touched his arm.

            “We do have a boat, Pooh.” He pointed at a spot over the fireplace where hung a large, dark blue umbrella.

            “The Brain of Pooh,” said Pooh, almost reverently. Fool stared at it for a moment, bemusedly.

            Then he said, “Yes, I suppose it would float. Not ideal, but desperate times…”

            He approached the fireplace. “If I may?”

            Pooh nodded and Fool took the umbrella down.

            “You’d better get some Provisions,” he said as he pulled on his cloak and pack. “Hurry.”

            Pooh grabbed a small jar of honey and Piglet filled a kerchief with haycorns. Fool caught up his walking stick and the three of them sprinted out of the house, the roof of which was beginning to smolder.

            They raced through the burning forest, Pooh leading because he knew the way. They dodged around patches of brightly burning grass and charred and fallen limbs. Once, Fool grabbed them both and pulled them into the shelter of a overhanging rock until the grey shape overhead had passed by, and once the smoke was so thick that they had to crawl on the their paws and knees. But when they at last drew near the river, they found a crackling wall of flames blocking their path.

            “We’re trapped!” squeaked Piglet and Pooh licked the tip of his nose is a cooling manner, but found that it helped him not at all. Fool, however, stayed calm. He picked up Pooh and Piglet and bundled them into the folds of his cloak along with the Brain of Pooh. Then he took a deep breath and ran at the wall of flames. At the last instant, he picked up his feet and leapt. There was a moment of terrible heat, and then they were through, splashing out into the shallows of the river.

            Fool opened the umbrella and set it on end so that it floated. Fortunately, it was a very large umbrella and none of them was very heavy. So, after a few initial wobbles, they set off downriver, revolving gracefully.

            For a long while the sky above them was dark with smoke so Pooh found it hard to be certain how long they’d been floating, but it seemed like several hours since they drifted under the bridge where he and Piglet and Roo and Rabbit and Eeyore used to play at Poohsticks, when at last the Fool spoke.

            “I don’t suppose you know what those things were?”

            “What things?” said Pooh, who was still thinking about Poohsticks.

            “The grey shapes in the sky. The ones who were burning the forest.”

            “No,” said Pooh and Piglet agreed. Then he thought for a moment and asked, “Will the whole forest be burnt down?”

            “I expect so,” said Fool sadly.

            “Oh,” said Pooh. He felt sad, but oddly the sadness was not so bad as it might have been. It was as if the sadness was too big for him to feel all at once, so it was coming to him slowly, in small doses.

            Beside him, Piglet sniffed. Pooh took his paw and squeezed it.

            “Do you suppose the others are alright?” asked Piglet. Pooh considered it.

            “They might be. Or then again they might not. Owl could fly away and Rabbit might burrow. Eeyore’s place is too wet to burn very well and Kanga would look after Roo and Tigger if she could. They’re pretty quick…but, well, there was a lot of fire.”

            Piglet nodded.

            “Will we ever be able to go back do you think?” Pooh asked Fool.

            “Maybe,” said Fool. “Not soon. Maybe not at all.”

            Pooh nodded.

            Around them the scenery began to change. All about grew small woods of resinous trees; cedar, cypress, and fir, with wide glades between them. Sweet smelling herbs grew on either bank, filling the air over the river with their fragrance. The sages put forth pale blossom; red and blue and green, and primeroles and anemones were awake in the filbert-brakes. Old stonework could be seen here and there, jutting up between the growth: old paving stones and shattered pillars. Dark green grass grew about the little pools where smaller streams fed the river, and mosses and rose brambles climbed over the great stones at the water’s edge.

            Fool steered the Brain of Pooh over to one of these stones and the trio scrambled out onto the bank. Fool plucked the umbrella out of the water and set it in the sun to dry while they ate their provisions in the shade of an ancient cedar hung with eglantine.

            “That’s quite a large umbrella,” remarked Fool as they ate. “Who does it belong to when it’s not being a boat? It’s far too large for either of you.”

            “It is Christopher Robin’s,” said Pooh with his mouthful.

            “Oh? Who is he?” asked Fool.

            Pooh thought about that. Christopher Robin was the one who you went to when you had a question, or something went wrong, or you just needed a friend, or for no reason at all. He knew everything and had been everywhere. He could fix anything. He was the wisest and bravest person Pooh knew.

            “He just a boy, really,” said Pooh because there are some things you can’t explain. Fool nodded because some things don’t need explaining.

            “And how does it happen that you have his umbrella?” asked Fool.

            “He went away,” said Pooh. “But he will come back. He always comes back.”

            Piglet made a little noise in his throat. Christopher Robin had been gone for a Long Time.

            Fool looked as though he wanted to say something, but at that moment they heard a noise in the distance. Fool went very still and then slowly raised a pale finger to his lips. He crept away in the direction of the noise. Pooh and Piglet followed.

            The noises grew louder as they neared the top of a small wooded rise. It sounded like footsteps, hundreds of them, and rattling metal. Fool got down on his hands and knees, crawling slowly forward through the undergrowth. He inched to the top, lying on his belly. Pooh inched along beside him, with Piglet brining up the rear.

            From the hilltop they could peer down into a deep rocky gorge. Along the floor of this gulch streamed swarthy men clad in red robes and bronze armor. Gold collars gleamed around their throats and curved swords swung at their hips. Their faces were proud and cruel, but they were not what drew the eyes. Behind the men paced a grey creature, bigger than any house, with legs like trees and a nose like a great serpent poised to strike. It huge tusks were bound with beaten gold, its vast ears flapped like sails, and the earth shuddered with the thunder of its footfalls. Upon its back was lashed a crimson tent, filled with men and bows and sheaves of arrows.

            “It’s a heffalump,” whispered Pooh. “A real heffalump!”

            Piglet just made a noise like a beetle being trodden on.

            “They’re soldiers,” said Fool. “Any fool could see that.” He seemed to be speaking to himself. “But they’re part of something bigger, something dark. There’s conflict coming, I can feel it. A war, most likely. A war that will decide everything to come.”

**~**


	8. Chapter Seven-A

Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully surveyed the emergency meeting of the Unseen University’s senior faculty. He wore the frazzled, careworn expression of a man who has been awakened in the wee hours of the morning to deal with a problem that is both baffling and potentially dangerous.

            “Are we all here yet, Mister Stibbons?” asked Ridcully. Ponder Stibbons, UU’s designated competent staff member, nodded wearily.[1] He too wore a frazzled, careworn expression, although in his case it was the frazzled, careworn expression of a man who has had to wake Mustrum Ridcully in the wee hours of the morning to explain that a baffling and potentially dangerous problem has arisen.

            “Alright,” the Archchancellor continued. “The official purpose of this meeting is to tell you all that the University library will be closed until further notice.”

            “You got us all up before noon just to tell us that?” said the Dean grumpily. “I had to rush my breakfast. No fourth course at all!”

            The Lecturer in Recent Runes, who was marginally less self-absorbed than the Dean, asked, “Why?”

            “It’s a bit difficult to explain,” said Ponder. “There’s been an enormous spike in thaumic activity inside the technically infinite dimensions of the library, which has resulted in…”

            “…the whole place being a damn great furnace full of magic,” cut in Ridcully.

            “Can anyone get in?” asked the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

            “Not if you’d like them to come out again. Alive. And in their own body,” said Ridcully, taking off his pointy hat and opening the small drinks cabinet in the top.

            “But where’s the magic coming from?” asked the Senior Wrangler.

            “I had a pet fish once,” explained the Bursar. “But my Aunty said it was after her fruitcake.”

            “Well done, Bursar,” said Ridcully, taking a long swig of something amber. “See that he takes his dried frog pills before we adjourn, Mr. Stibbons.”

            “Yes, Archchancellor,” said Ponder, dutifully. “And I’m afraid we aren’t sure where the magic’s coming from. The Librarian seemed to think it was coming from the books. He says they’re updating.”

            “Actually, he mostly says ‘Ook!’,” Ridcully pointed out.

            “Updating?” asked Dr. Hix, the Director of Postmortem Communications.[2] “Updating how?”

            “We’re not sure,” said Ponder. “But whatever they're doing creates a lot of magical radiation. I’ve got Professor Pelk working on it and he’s even resurrected old Professor Goiter, poor chap. They’re still baffled. And it’s taking nearly sixty percent of Hex’s runetime just to keep the energy contained.”

            “What about the Librarian?” asked the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

            “Gone to have a stiff drink, I expect,” said Ridcully.

**~**

            Angua, Carrot, and Sally moved down Mane Street, riding the wake of Constable Dorfl. When a Golem walks down even the most crowded street, people tend to get out of the way. Of course, Angua thought, she and Sally were probably at least as dangerous as Dorfl; they just advertised it less. Carrot was no mean fighter himself, of course, but he was far too polite to actually threaten passersby.

            Angua was feeling more than a little on edge. Part of this was the case, of course. She’d seen a fair number of horrible murders but the emotionless eyes of the prisoners they’d taken were deeply unnerving. The other part was to do with the time of the month. Last night had been waxing gibbous; the wolf in her was strong at such times. Being so near the vampire didn’t help either. Angua had gotten to quite like Sally, in an odd sort of way, but her scent still grated on Angua’s instincts.

            Their motley quarto turned off Mane Street onto Black Cat Alley. The crowds were thinner here and more ragged. They were getting into the seedier parts of the city, which for Ankh-Morpork was saying something. Angua could smell faint wisps of fear drifting up from the people who watched them pass. Extra coppers down here were a bad sign.

            As they turned onto Ratcatcher Street, the faint fear odor was overwhelmed by the stench of filth and old blood, which grew stronger the closer they grew to the abandoned house. If anything, the place smelled fouler than it had last night.

            “This Is The Place,” Dorfl announced as they drew to a halt. Carrot nodded. The house had already been roped off in black and yellow.

            “I won’t be able to pick up anything much in there,” warned Angua. “The reek’s too strong.”

            Concern showed in Carrot’s blue eyes and he raised one hand as if to stroke Angua’s ash blond hair, but stopped himself. They were on duty.

            “You’d best stay outside then,” he said. “It’s probably better in any case. I think we might have been followed.”

            None of them asked how Carrot knew this. His connection to the city was strong, but not a healthy area of inquiry.

            “Constable von Humperding, will you be alright in there?” asked Carrot.

            “Old blood is not a problem for me, Captain,” Sally replied.

            “Good. Then you and I will go have a poke around. Angua, watch the back door. Dorfl, you take the front. We won’t be more than half an hour or so.”

            Reluctantly, Angua nodded.

 

            Inside the gloom of the abandoned building, Carrot fished around in his belt pouch for a glow-bar. He brought out the short glass tube and shook it until the chemicals inside began to glow. The heatless lights were a new addition to the Watch, courtesy of the Alchemists’ Guild.

            “Better than a torch,” remarked Carrot. “This place could be a real firetrap.”

            By the light of the glow-bar, they took stock of the room. Tables and chairs lay on their sides like stricken animals, bits torn free to feed the fireplace. Blankets and curtains had been wadded into crude nests in three corners of the room. Coins and other bright objects glittered in the soiled folds of cloth, the hoards of deranged and murderous magpies. Blood and human waste stained the uneven floorboards and bones and uneaten food were strewn about at random. The smell was nauseating. Insects buzzed and crawled over everything.

            Carrot went over and poked at one of the nests with the end of his truncheon. A mouse scurried out, dislodging some small change, and empty ring, and a broken shard of mirror.

            “They can’t even tell what’s valuable,” Carrot mused.

            “Oh damn,” hissed Sally. Carrot turned around quickly. The vampire had been examining one of the bones of the floor, but she stood up hurriedly, clutching at her face.

            “What’s wrong?”

            “Damn these flies. One of them’s gotten into my eye and it hurts like the nine Hells.”

            “Here, let me help,” said Carrot reaching for his pocket-handkerchief.

 

            Angua had grown tired of waiting. If there were someone lurking in the house’s muddy little back lot, she would have smelled him by now. She pushed open the back door and walked inside.

            By the light of the discarded glow-bar, she saw Carrot and Sally standing in the center of the room. Carrot had his back to her and he was gently cradling the vampire’s lovely face in his strong hands, guiding it towards his own…

            Angua howled.

**~**

 

 

 

[1] Gathering wizards could be said to be like herding cats, if cats a) weighed a great deal more and b) threw fireballs.

[2] Who was definitely NOT a necromancer


	9. Chapter IX

_I have made a certain study of the legends surrounding what are known in Buck as ‘Witness Stones’, though I have heard locals in half a dozen far-flung hamlets call them ‘Way Stones’, ‘Standing Stones’, ‘Skill Stones’, ‘Grey Stones’, and ‘Sentinel Stones’. Some maintain that they mark the sites of faeries dances, other some that the fair folk cannot abide the sight of the stones. More pervasive however, and to my mind more interesting, are the tales of strange disappearances and reappearances that surround these sites, often coupled with supernaturally slow or rapid aging, suggesting that the subject was moved not only in space, but in time._

_-_ From Garon’s “Folklore of the Six Duchies”

 

I stepped out from the looming shelter of the trees and clinging undergrowth. Above, the night sky wheeled away, dark and endless, strewn with stars like frozen tears. I breathed out, trying to push away a little of the bitterness that sat heavy in my chest. My breath steamed in the chilly air.

            _“Brother?”_ asked Nighteyes, gently pressing his mind against mine.

            _“I’ll be all right,”_ I lied, and reached up to adjust my travel sack.

            _“We should not have gone there,”_ said Nighteyes. An image of the little cottage swam to the forefront of our joined consciousness. The mingled scents of Molly and Burrich, leather and honey, were strong in Nighteyes’ memory.

            “Perhaps not,” I said aloud. “But I’ve never been known for having good ideas, have I?”

            I kept walking, following a narrow game trail that climbed up the low hill before us. Nighteyes trotted after me, silent as only a wolf at night can be.

            There was frost weighing down the long grass on the hillside and it crackled under my worn boots. I supposed I should be glad. The years Nighteyes and I had spent wandering, nameless and directionless, across the Six Duchies and beyond had not driven Molly and Burrich apart. No accident or illness had befallen them. They were well and whole. Two of the people I loved best in world were well and whole. So why did I feel like I was dying?

            Ahead, dark on the hilltop, a tall shape loomed. I had not seen it, so lost had I been in my own melancholy. My hand flew instantly to the axe at my belt. I had Verity’s sword as well, and a crude hunting bow, but they hung on my back, wrapped in sackcloth and soft leather. The axe was my weapon of first resort.

            I quested out carefully and found nothing but a warren of sleepy rabbits curled up beneath the earth.

            _“Nighteyes?”_ I asked silently.

            _“I smell nothing,”_ he replied, his hackles rising in response to my own fear.

            I crept forward and saw, by the stars’ pale light, that what I had taken for an enormous, broad-shouldered man was in fact a standing stone.

            I took another step forward and laid my palm on its cold surface. It was darker even than the night around it and more than seven feet tall and four wide. Faint lines might have been carved on it long ago, but weather and time had reduced them to a mere memory in the rock. It reminded me of the Skill Stones along the mountain road where Kettle had taught me the stone game. Then it reminded me of the old Witness Stones by Buckkeep Castle.

            I thought of the day Burrich had dragged the Skillmaster up to the Witness Stones and beaten him bloody in the eyes of gods and men to buy me a second chance to learn the Skill. A second chance.

            “You don’t get them, really,” I said to the stone. I could feel my eyes getting hot. “Second chances. Galen had broken me already. You don’t get second chances.”

            And I realized the real reason for the dull ache in my chest. It hadn’t been because I’d gone to look at the cottage. It was because I’d only looked. Some part of me wanted, desperately, to go down to it, to see her again, to hold her again and never let go. A second chance.

            I howled, not just with my throat but with my mind, pouring Wit and Skill out into the night. I pounded my fist against the stone, felt the skin break, the blood begin to flow.

            The world blurred, but perhaps that was only the tears stinging my eyes.

**~**

            By the time the sky was going from pink to gold, I was beginning to question the wisdom of my decision. There was only one road worth the name that led north from Imre, and I was on it. But somewhere in the sleep-starved, adrenaline-soaked welter of my brain the realization was dawning on me that people who could fly wouldn’t have to follow the roads.

            I stopped in the shade of a spreading elm tree that stood by the roadside, the early morning light making its leaves shine like panes of emerald glass, and tried to bully my recalcitrant mind into thought.

            They were strangers to the area. Their body language at the Eolian had all but screamed it. They weren’t carrying much with them. The bags on their broomsticks could carry a change of clothes and some tools maybe, but I hadn’t seen any signs of food in their luggage, let alone tents. So they’d be looking for an inn. They wouldn’t want to risk stopping at a cottage, not if they were strangers and afraid of being burned at the stake.

            They wouldn’t know where to start looking for an inn though. They’d have to stop and ask. Where would folk around here send them, assuming they didn’t simply run off screaming when they saw the flying brooms?

            I took a long drink from my waterskin as I thought about the inns I’d heard of on the roads near Imre. Only one name sprang to mind: the Ragman. It was more than half a day’s brisk walk from the city limits, but that was probably as close as they’d want to stay in any case. I didn’t know how fast those brooms could fly. They might be there already. I needed a shortcut.

            I set off into the forest at a brisk walk, that gradually gave way to a brisk scramble. Gnarled tree roots, bushes, and cobwebs became increasingly numerous, but my days under Laclith’s instruction stood me in good stead and I was not overly hindered.

            I don’t remember exactly when the sensation began, but not long before noon I came to a halt in a gap in the undergrowth that was too small to be dignified by calling it a clearing. My skin was prickling. I was being watched.

            I peered into the shadows of the forest, but I could see no one. I had a sudden recollection of Eldoin telling me that E’lir meant “see-er” and I looked again. Gradually, out of the scrub and in the forked limbs of trees, they appeared, like pictures in a campfire.

            “Ach well, mebbe he ain’t so blind after all,” one of them said.

            They stood about six inches high but were shaped like men. Scarred, muscular men, the sort who could turn from unemployed mercenaries into bandits faster than the eye could follow. Their skins were bluish, though it was hard to say if that was their natural coloring or the result of the dozens of tribal tattoos that covered them. They wore grubby kilts and necklaces of bones and teeth. Many had more bones braided into their violently red hair and each one carried a sword as tall as himself.

            “Right noo, laddie,” said one wearing a weasel skull helmet. “Why is it yer goin’ the same way we’s goin’?”

            “Coincidence?” I suggested, hoping I’d understood him correctly. His accent was rough and thick but with a lilt that was entirely different from Kilvin’s Cealdish growl.

            “I dinnae think so, Rob,” said an especially tiny blue man who had what looked like a pair of bagpipes strapped to his back. Two leathery ears protruded from the bag.

            “Aye, I dinnae think so neither,” agreed the helmeted man. “So I’s gunna ask ye again. What tak’s ye this way? We’s under a geas, ye ken so it’s fair eldritch that ye’d be walkin’ the same path.”

            “Look…I’m just heading for the Ragman inn,” I said in my best placating voice. “I don’t know anything about your eldritch goose or whatever…”

            “Look at 'is sword, Rob,” cut in a blue man nearly seven inches tall with a necklace of what looked to be human teeth.

            I glanced at the blade I’d taken from the floor of the Eolian. The canvas wrapping must have caught against a low branch as I pushed my way through the forest. It was partially peeled away from the hilt and blade. The dark metal shone dully in the dappled sunlight, but pale lines or flowing characters were visible along its length.

            “’Tis a perilous weapon,” said Tooth-necklace darkly. “And he’s tracking oor hag.”

            “A dark blade,” agreed the piper, “Fro’ the armories o’ the kings fro’ o’er the sea.”

            “Nae King!” cried the Skull-wearer, drawing his sword. The others followed suit a half-heartbeat later.

            “Nae King! Nae Quin! Nae Lahrd! Nae Master! We will na be fooled again!”

            And with that they surged towards me in a screaming, snarling, blue and red tide.

            I reacted instinctively, drawing the stolen sword in the same fluid stage fencer’s motion that Teren had shown me half a lifetime ago. I swung it in a wide semicircle and so wickedly did it hiss that even the reckless courage of these tiny blue marauders seemed to dent and they shied back from it. It was only for a moment, but it was enough.

            I sprinted through the gap that had appeared in their lines, before it had a chance to close, and ran for it. They gave chase, tripping each other up and bouncing off tree roots, but still moving inhumanly fast.

            One dropped on me from above. He missed my head but clung grimly to my long hair. Other front-runners snatched at the hem of my cloak and bounced along behind me like homicidal tassels. I felt a sword swipe bite into the meat of my foot, narrowly missing the tendon. In moments, they would be swarming over me, overwhelming me entirely.

            The forest opened out in front of me and I found myself on the bank of a swift river. Without pausing to think, I dropped the sword and plunged into the water. I took one deep lungful of air before I sank beneath the surface.

            My hope was to rid myself of the creatures by virtue of superior lung capacity and under other circumstances it might have worked. As it was, I now found myself to be drowning as well as under attack. My sodden clothes pulled at me. The water seemed choked with tiny, screaming bodies. I felt one of them kick me hard enough to crack a rib. Then I caught my skull on a submerged log and everything went black.

**~**

            The Stone I landed on jutted out over the river like a pier, the fast running water lapping at its sides. It was larger than the one I had struck but was obviously of a kind with it.

            These were the first details that I noticed as the world snapped back into focus, like someone cinching a knot.

            I was still in a forest, but it was daylight and warmer. The stone under me was hot from hours in the sun. My bloodied hand throbbed and I felt dizzy.

            _“Brother, something comes.”_ Nighteyes was standing on the bank beside me, his gaze fixed on the forest.

            Out of the trees burst a red-haired man, barely out of boyhood, his cloak flapping wildly. He held a long sword in one hand and was closely pursued by a swarm of tiny blue men waving their own swords and screaming.

            The man flung down his weapon and dove into the water. The furious pursuers sprang in after him. He thrashed wildly, throwing up waves, but did not resurface.

            _“Brother…”_ said Nighteyes.

            _“I know,”_ I replied. “Eda and El…” I tore off my pack and heavy cloak, and dropped into the river.

            Beneath the surface all was a turmoil of struggling bodies and great, billowing clouds of silty mud. I felt one of the little men’s swords nick the flesh of my forearm and I _repelled_ at them with all the strength of Wit old Rolf had taught me. They pulled away from the contact like wasps fleeing smoke. I seized the cloaked man by the back of his collar and hauled him with me, scrambling back up onto the broad stone. Some of his attackers still clung to him, woozy and half-drowned. Others had made it onto the riverbank and were swarming towards us. I _repelled_ again, Nighteyes adding his strength to mine. They reeled drunkenly.

            “Ach crivens…” moaned one in a weasel skull helmet, as he fought to stay upright. “Let’s offsky.”

            There was a blue blur close to the ground and they were gone.

            _“What were they?”_ Nighteyes wondered as I tugged our unconscious companion’s pack and sodden cloak off. _“They had minds like men and yet not men’s minds.”_

“And they fought as a unit,” I remarked, rolling the red-haired stranger onto his back. Up close he looked younger, both more boyish and more elfin. “Not like soldiers, but like ants or bees.”

            I pressed both hands hard against the boy’s chest, forcing out river water and letting him suck in a long breath of life-giving air. His eyelids fluttered, then opened. His eyes were a startling green. He coughed and tried to sit up.

            “Easy now,” I said in the gentle voice Burrich used on skittish dogs and horses. “Just lie still for a moment, my fine idiot fox cub. You’ve been being rather stupid, haven’t you? Just hold still until you’ve got some air back into you.”

            He lay back, wheezing wetly. I continued the soft, almost nonsensical diatribe. I barley heard my own words.

            “Haven’t you ever seen a man trying to outswim bees before? I have, more than once, for I knew a girl who kept bees once upon a time, and it never works. Never. Do you hear that, lack-wit fox? Never. And leaping in with your pack on was just plain stupid. So you lie quiet a bit now. You were pretty near dead, but it’s all right now. Lie still.”

            He did, letting his head rest against the heavy wool of my cloak. I stood and turned to Nighteyes.

            “Watch him, to make sure he doesn’t go into shock. I’ll start us a fire. Eda and El, what have we gotten ourselves into?”

**~**


	10. Chapter 10

Chief Rockglass of the Earth Thunder Clan was a real troll. Bigger than a cave bear and more savage than an avalanche, his craggy, coal black face was known and feared throughout the western Ramtops. Vivid blue lichen clung to his massive shoulders and the slope of his broad back. His diamond tusks were scimitars and fists sledgehammers. The skulls of men and dwarfs clattered from his belt and they said that as the stone-shaman had chiseled the volcano pictogram into his chest, he had not so much as winced. _Lashrhāg_ , his club was called, the Brain Hammer, made from the trunk of a great counting pine he’d uprooted with his bare hands. The tree’s age—eight hundred and eighty-eight—was still visible through the mess of arrowheads and broken blades lodged in the wood. He had fathered more than forty trollings on a dozen wives. He was fearless in battle and had never been bested.

            This morning, he felt like he was going to die.

**~**

            We made our camp or bivouac (unless that’s a dish with onions) under a rocky outcrop not far from the wreck of the two-seater. The hobbits weren’t in a fit state to do much walking, poor chaps, and in any event the light was fading jolly fast. Jeeves produced food and blankets and things from our luggage and after a light meal and a spot of brandy, we retried.

            I can’t say that I slept soundly, but then again I doubt that anyone who ever sleeps on the rocky floor of a mountain pass ever sleeps exactly soundly. These mountain passes are even worse than rural gazebos in this respect.

            At what felt like the crack of dawn, Jeeves awoke me with the morning tea.

            “Morning Jeeves,” I said blearily. “No paper today?”

            “No sir. If you would recollect, we are stranded in the desolate mountains.”

            “Say what? Oh yes, I see what you mean. Is this tea in a jam jar, Jeeves?”

            “I am afraid so, sir. The good china was regrettably destroyed in the crash. I am sorry, sir.”

            “Ah well. All crockery is as grass, wot?”

            “Just so sir. I believed there is a stream some forty yards distant, if you would care to wash. I have already laid out the ivory soap and a fresh towel. Breakfast should be ready shortly.”

            “Thank you Jeeves.”

            The water was colder than one of my Aunt Agatha’s looks, but I made the best of it. All the same, it was a shivering and bluish Betrum Wooster who staggered back to the fireside clad in a white towel with rabbits printed on it.

            “Where are my cl-cl-clothes, J-Jeeves?” I chattered.

            “Arranged on the boulder to your left, sir. I have done my best sir but I am afraid the effect is more _dishabille_ than truly suave.”

            I put them on anyway, though I saw what the honest fellow meant. I was starting to look more like a guerilla of the Venezuelan jungle than a London boulevardier and clubman. I felt the loss of my hat keenly, but noted that Jeeves had set out a second tie. I gave him the quizzical eyebrow.

            “If I might make the suggestion,” he said with a light cough, “I thought it possible that one of your ties might serve the office of a bandana or kerchief. Personally, I would advocate the use of dove grey article with pattern of spades and clubs. It will, I think, be more suitably rakish.”

            I nodded and cinched tight the tie he had indicated.

            Jeeves woke Merry and Pippin and we all sat down to eat. Breakfast was toast and marmalade along with some hot sweet tea and slivers from a roast fowl of some sort.

            “How did you come by that, Jeeves?” I asked. “I’m sure there was no poultry in the suitcases.”

            “No sir. I took the liberty of using one of the two fowling guns, sir.”

            “Fowling guns, Jeeves?”

            “Yes sir. I packed the pair that Mr. Esmond Haddock had made for you last Christmas.”

            “Oh yes. Quite so,” I said, strains of ‘A Hunting We Shall Go’ reverberating within the ear of memory. “I say Jeeves, do you suppose I should start carrying one of those?”

            “I would advocate it, sir.”

            So it was that as we set off, I was armed not only with my cane and putter, but also with a pretty nice-ish duck-shooter. And I must say, it took the edge right off my nerves. The nobility of the mêlée is all very well but, for a lad who has been the Drones dart champion for six years running, a bit of long-range stuff helps prop up the morale.

**~**

            There was a drink they made.[1] It involved a quarter cup of copper carbonate (finely ground), a generous tumbler-full of sulfuric acid, and a pinch of a half dozen other chemicals, rarely seen outside of an alchemist’s daydream. And also a lump of sodium metal as big as a man’s thumb. The thing had to be drunk quickly, or it was liable to explode. They called it _Untahck,_ trollish for Deep Pain. A single draught could lay out a troll for a day. But Chief Rockglass was no ordinary troll.

            Today, he was learning the difference between sodium and francium.

**~**

            The weather, as we continued our little alpine jaunt, was exceptionally fine, with crisp air, sunny skies, and all the fixings. I suppose that this should have warned me at the outset that in another two ticks the Wooster soul was going to take one on the chin once more. I’ve noticed before, when I’m about to be or have just been going through a sticky patch, that the weather refuses to pick up its cues. When the sky should be mottled and ominous with clouds, and the silence broken by distant rolls of thunder, all one seems to hear are bluebirds.

            As we crossed a flattish sort of spot with a fair bit of heather and so on growing between the boulders, I heard a deep rumbling noise, and one of these aforementioned boulders stood up and glared at me. It had a hunched back but still stood a good seven feet or so and look capable of folding even a tough egg like Roderick Spode into something smaller than your average handkerchief. As I watched in amazement, it was joined by a couple of other boulders, similarly sized.

            “Erahg-hackkar?” it asked, sounding like a landslide with a upper respiratory infection. I hadn’t the foggiest what the fellow meant, but Jeeves shot back with,

            “Chov’t hackkrunt groudān. Cruzhtahg Morporkian?”

            I goggled at the man. Though I knew from experience that Jeeves knows practically everything, I hadn’t expected him to be fluent in Boulder-ese or whatever it was.

            “Yeah, some,” the thing replied. “Youse is on da land of da Earth Thunder Clan. Youse is trespassin’ an’…vie-oh-late-tin…clan law. We’s gotta take you to da Chief.”

            “And if we don’t want to go?” I said with more spirit than I felt.

            “Den we smash you inna head,” said our captor. “’Course youse probly gonna get smashed inna head anyway, but you never know.”

            “The Chief might let us go?”

            “Nah. But he might wanna have youse arms and legs ripped off instead.”

            “Out of the frying pan and into the fire!” said Merry and began to laugh helplessly. I felt this to be in rather poor taste, but you could see his point. Having the prospect of certain death replaced by the prospect of certain death couldn’t be said to be much of a positive trend.

            The trolls, for that of course is what they were, tied our hands behind out backs with a scratchy sort of rope woven out of moss fibers, and marched us off to their camp. I can’t be sure how far it was, but far enough to ensure that my new brown oxfords were well and truly broken in. The camp was based around the mouth of a largish cave at the far end of a rocky valley. A large number of trolls were hanging about, polishing clubs, cleaning grass from under their toenails, and napping. There were quite a few little trolls and some that might have been female, though it was dashed hard to say, seeing as they were all more or less made out of rock. We Woosters are pretty quick on the uptake and it dawned on me then that this wasn’t just some bunch of ruffians and thugs. This was a village, with families and whatnot. A spark of the old Wooster optimism kindled within me. We might just get through this yet.

            We were stopped at the cave mouth by two even surlier looking trolls with clubs of the notably large and spiky variety.

            “Gotta take dis lot to see da Chief,” said our captor.

            “Da Chief ain’t feelin’ too good,” warned the guard with a shake of his head, which dislodged a resident beetle. “I don’t tink he want to see any prisoners.”

            “I got my orders,” said our captor, stubbornly, and we were admitted,

            At the far end of the big cave, sitting on a heap of furs and things, was the largest and most savage looking troll we had yet seen. His stone was black, like, oh what’s the word…obsequious, no that’s no it…ophidian, no that’s not it either…Jeeves would know. His front teeth were running to tusks and he frowned when he saw us.

            “Why you bring me dese prisoners, Slatejaw?” he asked in a voice like a purring earthquake. “Take dem away and bash dey head in.”

            “Yes, Chief Rockglass sir!” the troll identified as Slatejaw said loudly and saluted.

            The noise caused Rockglass to start violently and clutch at his forehead. He moaned, a low hollow one, and sank back against the cave wall. And in that instant, out of the fog of terror that had enveloped me at this chieftain’s words of doom, light shone.

            “Jeeves,” I said with barely a tremor in my voice, “Be so good as to mix friend Rockglass here one of your special morning-afters.”

**~**

 

[1] Actually, there were a great many drinks, as far more of the Periodic Table is open for troll consumption than for human.


	11. Chapter XI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Three Strangers are Encountered and the Fool Gives Advice…

They waited until the strange soldiers and the heffalump had travelled out of sight and then crept back to the cedar tree where they had taken lunch. Fool decided that they were too exposed there and so they gathered up their meager supplies and headed off inland. As they went, Pooh asked Piglet what ‘exposed’ meant, but quietly so that Fool might not hear him and take offense.

            By now the sky was growing dim and the pale stars were speckling its purple tapestry. They halted in a little bowl-shaped valley ringed by high briars and sweet smelling creepers so that it was quite sheltered from view. They built a little fire of pinewood that burned cleanly, without any smoke to speak of, and ate traveler’s bread and dried fruit and sharp white cheese from the last of Fool’s trail rations. He brought out a blanket as well and wrapped it around Pooh and Piglet. About himself he pulled his traveling cloak, and then he stared somberly into the dancing flames.

            “Do you know any stories?” asked Pooh.

            “A few,” replied Fool. “Why?”

            “I don’t know,” said Pooh. “I suppose that a bonfire just seems a little lonely without one. Like bread without honey.”

            Fool nodded and after a moment he began.

 

            _“Once when the world was young, there was a woman who had three daughters. The first daughter was called Eckaba, which meant ‘the wild one’ in the tongue of that country. She was as strong as any man and bolder than most. When other girls wore ribbons and treasured their dolls, Eckaba wore dusty leathers and kept her daggers sharp. She boasted that there was no horse she could not ride and no man she could not best in battle._

_The second daughter was called Melayna, which meant ‘the lovely one’. She was the most beautiful woman in all that country. No man could see her and be unentranced. They showered her in gifts and compliments, which she basked in like a lizard in the sun. She broke their hearts._

_The third daughter was called Adana, which meant ‘the clever one’. She was quick, though not as strong as Eckaba, and pretty, though not as beautiful as Melayna. She kept company with cats and loved best of all to hear the stories that the elders told._

_When the woman had grown very old, she called her daughters together…”_

            A branch snapped in the sheltering hedge of brambles and Fool fell instantly silent. He motioned for Pooh and Piglet to hide beneath the heavy blanket. Then he caught up his walking staff and crept noiselessly to the edge of the hollow.

**~**

            Sam thought he could see the light of a small fire twinkling through the screen of creepers as the travelers crawled down into the little bowl shaped valley. He was about to mention this to Frodo, when his master spoke.

            “I know Sam. I see it too. But we’ve seen no marks of orcs and Gollum would have scented men.”

            “Is it elves then, Mister Frodo?” asked Sam in a whisper as they watched Gollum ease his way forward through the bracken.

            “I don’t know Sam,” said Frodo. “But I feel it’s more likely to be a friend than an enemy.”

            “Still, we’d do well to have out swords ready, begging your pardon,” said Sam. Frodo nodded and they drew their blades. Sam had his little sword from the Barrow Downs while Frodo carried Sting. He was reassured to see that no blue light came from the weapon.

            Ahead of them, Gollum, whose attention had been given to the ground before him, became suddenly aware of the firelight. He started backwards and a twig snapped loudly beneath his flat feet. The travelers froze.

            Then a clear voice called out, “I know you’re there. Come out slowly into the firelight and drop your weapons.”

            The others looked to Frodo. “Do as he says,” the hobbit advised. “It is too late to hide and we’d never outrun them in this brush.”

            They walked forward out of the brambles, blinking in the yellow light, Gollum muttering curses low in his throat. Sam and Frodo let their swords drop to the earth and their discoverer swept them away with the end of his staff.

            He was a strange creature, man shaped and man tall, but more slender than a dancer. He wore dusty traveling garb over black and white motley and carried no weapons, they now realized, beyond his staff and a small knife. His skin was cream colored, or perhaps the palest gold, like the early honeysuckle that bloomed along the walls of Bag End each spring. His fine hair and bright eyes were of the same color.

            “Who are you?” asked Frodo. “And what do you do in Ithilien?”

            “I might ask you very much the same question,” replied the man, if man he was.

            “Our names are of small consequence,” answered Frodo, “And our business is safer when it goes unspoken.”

            “Yet I must have something to call you by. Here, you may call me Fool, for I have no better name. Come sit by our fire. We have little enough food, but enough to share a little.”

            “You are generous,” said Frodo, “and I will be glad to sit with you. I am called Frodo, and my companions are Samwise and Smeagól.”

            At this Gollum hissed, “Don’t tell it our name, precious. Don’t trust it! It has no smell, precious, no smell!”

            “Well that’s more than can be said for you, at any rate,” remarked Sam. “Come on Smeagól. He’s only trying to be hospitable.”

            Gollum was still reluctant, but at Frodo’s bidding he came and joined the others at the fire.

            From underneath a heavy blanket, a small bear and an even smaller pig emerged. They reminded Sam of the toys some hobbit children would carry about, but they moved and spoke and made the hobbits welcome. Fool brought out the end of a loaf of traveller’s bread with nuts, and a packet of dried apples, and a wedge of hard cheese. Frodo shared out some of the stores they had brought with them from Lórien including some of the precious lèmbas bread. At the taste, Fool looked surprised but he made no comment.

**~**

            “Will you finish the story now?” asked Pooh, when the food was gone. Piglet sat very close to him, eyeing the visitors’ swarthy, froglike companion nervously. Fool smiled and looked at the visitors.

            “If our guests have no objection. The tale is already begun I fear, but it is an old story so perhaps you will have heard it before.”

            “Pray continue,” said the dark-haired visitor, who seemed to be their leader. “I have no objections.”

            And so Fool continued the story.

 

            _“When the woman had grown very old she called her daughters together._

_‘Daughters,’ she said ‘I have taught you all that I can and I am proud of each one of you. Yet my time is coming to an end and I can leave my house and my land to only one of you.’_

_The three looked at each other in surprise. They had not ever thought their mother would someday be gone._

_‘Therefore, I have devised a test. On the far side of the hill where this house stands, there are three caves. Each of you shall have one day to fill her cave from floor to ceiling. The one who completes this task shall have the home and my blessing.’_

_The daughters nodded._

_On the first day, Eckaba tried to fill her cave. She rose before dawn and went out with a spade and an axe into the scrubland behind their mother’s house. She felled many trees and dug up many great stones and carried them swiftly to the cave. She was strong and fast and worked all day, but she could not fill the cave._

_On the second day, Melayna tried to fill her cave. She rose before dawn and went to all the houses where men lived who had loved her. She asked for their help and not one could refuse her. They worked long and hard to fill the cave with stone and timber, but even though they were many in number, they could not do it._

_On the third day, Adana tried to fill her cave. She slept well into the morning and ate a late breakfast of sticky dates and crushed almonds. Then she went around visiting all her friends in the village, chatting and laughing and listening to their stories. Melayna and Eckaba were very much indignant._

_‘Does she not mean to try at all?’ they wondered._

_When the sky began to darken however, Adana at last went down to her cave. She waited until full night had fallen and the lookers-on were wild with impatience. Then she pulled a single taper from the pocket of her gown and lit it. And the cave filled with light from floor to ceiling._

_And so Adana won the house and lands. She held them well and was always kind to the poor and respectful to the elders. She was married in due season and bore many healthy children, who in turn begat her many grandchildren, who begat her great-grandchildren, and so on and on until the world grows old.”_

           

            It was silent in the little hollow for a while when Fool was done speaking. Then Pooh asked,

            “And did they get enough to eat?”

            “Who?”

            “All those children and grandchildren and so on.”

            Oh yes,” said Fool. “They all had plenty to eat. Even the other sisters.”

            “Oh,” said Pooh. “Well, that’s all right then.”

            Then, overcome by his long day, Winnie the Pooh curled himself up and was soon fast asleep. Piglet remained awake a little longer, watching the dancing flames, but as the fire burned lower, he too dropped off to sleep.

            “So,” said Fool quietly, “What did you think of the story?”

            “It was new to me,” said Frodo. “But I liked the ending.”

            “Just so,” replied Fool. “Cleverness and a light in the darkness should always prevail.”

            “I’m just glad it wasn’t the first two who got the house,” said Sam. “Hewing down trees just to fill a cave? Who ever heard of such a thing?”

            “Folk have felled more trees for worse reasons,” cautioned Fool. “But your answer speaks well of you. What of you Smeagól? How did the tale strike you?”

            Sam didn’t think that Gollum would answer, but he was wrong.

            “The cave was already full, precious. She didn’t have to go making nasty fires, oh no. The cave was full, full up of dark.”

            Fool smiled sadly.

            “Alas,” he said, “Some hurts are beyond healing.”

            Sam frowned at this.

            “You seem very knowing, Master Fool, and I wonder what your business in this part of the country is. I wouldn’t expect to see a jester wandering about so near to the Black Land, unless perhaps he told jests to the Dark Lord or one of his captains.”

            But Fool shook his head.

            “I am a stranger in these lands and know little of this Dark Lord, save that you speak his name with dread. I am gifted with a little sight. Not a foretelling of the future but glimpses of many a perhaps.”

            “And what do you glimpse for us?” asked Frodo.

            “You bear a great burden that warps all fates around itself, so that you are doom and salvation made one. Your fates are bound so tight together that the three might be one. No path remains where one of you shall long survive without the others. Darkness surrounds you. You are the bright spark, someone’s tiny flickering catalyst. They have pushed your playing piece across the board in a desperate gambit and now can only wait and pray.”

            “You are right,” said Frodo. “I bear a burden. But he who sent me here is beyond even prayer. He is fallen.”

            “I am sorry to hear it,” said Fool. Frodo only nodded.

            “We must get some rest. I would that we might travel with you, but our need of haste is great. We leave before first light. Have you any warning to keep us safe upon the road?”

            “Trust in each other,” said Fool, “even when it seems unwise. Doubt is a paralyzing poison. You must rely on one another, for in this dark hour, there can be no other aid.”

            Frodo noticed that Fool had taken out a half-finished wooden figure as he spoke, and was carving it with his little knife. As he worked, the tips of two fingers glittered with a silver light. Frodo was reminded of the water in Galadriel’s mirror, but it brought him little comfort.

**~**


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve

 

            “If we could just go over that last bit again,” said Vimes in the tones of one who is ascertaining the depth of the pit in which he finds himself.

            Dorfl looked at Vimes plaintively, in so far as it is possible to look plaintive when your eyes are two fiery holes in a face made of clay. Golems weren’t good at understanding emotions and the constable was out of his depth.

            “I Was Guarding The Front Of The Building, When Sergeant Angua Came Out. She Seemed To Be Upset. She Told Me That All Men Were Bastards. Then She Left. After That, Corporal Von Humperding Came Out Of The House. She Was Upset Also. She Said That All Werewolves Were Jealous Bitches. I Am Unsure If This Was A Pun. Then She Left.”

            Vimes grimaced. “Sounds like I’d better send someone 'round to Biers. One of 'em will show up there, you can bet on it. What happened next?”

            “Captain Ironfounderson Came Out Of The House, Sir.”

            “And what did he say?”

            “Nothing. He Just Sighed, Sir.”

            “And then he left?”

            “Yes Sir.”

            “Can’t have coppers shirking duty, Constable. We’ve got to get them back here. Go tell Cheery I want her to run down to the Mended Drum and look for Angua and tell Reg to pop over to Biers for Sally.”

            “Yes Sir. What About Captain Ironfounderson, Sir?”

            “You leave that to me.”

            Most coppers, Vimes knew, when life began handing out complimentary citrus fruits, headed for bars. It was almost instinctual, like the way plants twisted towards the sun or geese flew Rimward with the frost. But Carrot was different.

            Vimes stood up, flipped the little sign on his office door so that it read “Out of His Bleeding Mind”[1], went out into the street, and called a coach.

            “The Royal Art Museum,” Vimes told the cabman. A good officer knows his men.

            He found Carrot in front of a large oil painting. It depicted a proud, three mast ship pinioned in the viselike jaws of an ice floe, outlined against the strangely yellow light of a gathering storm.

            “It’s called _Aghshpritz,” **[2]** _ said Carrot without turning round. “Inspired by Admiral Poundsworth’s ill-fated expedition to Whale Bay. The artist, Hector von Shmalfry, meant it to be a metaphor for man’s losing battle against nature.”

            “Really?” asked Vimes, whose only experience with nature until a few years ago had been once tripping over a fox as it darted out of an overturned dustbin.

            “Yes sir,” said Carrot. “Sorry about not stopping back at the watch house, sir.”

            “Don’t worry about it. If anyone’s got leave time they haven’t used, it’s you. But, Carrot, I’ve got to know what happened.”

            Carrot studied the painting carefully.

            “Angua thinks she caught me kissing Corporal Humperding, sir. I told her that I was taking a fly out of her eye, but she doesn’t believe me. You know she’s always been, well, jealous of Sally.”

            “Yes, werewolves are funny about vampires that way,” said Vimes.

            “Well,” continued Carrot, “I think this was the last straw. I’m afraid we may be over, sir.”

            “What, totally?”

            “Yes sir,” said Carrot. His voice didn’t falter or grow thick with emotion, but Vimes could tell that he was close to crying.

            “Look,” he said, “You can’t hang around here. Great art causes depression, well known fact. Who was the loony bugger who cut off his ear?”

            “Van Cumb?”

            “Yeah, probably. Don’t want to end up like that, right? Come back to the Yard with me. Real work, that what you need. Work hard enough and you won’t have time to think. Then you go out and get drunk, fall asleep, and do it all again tomorrow. And you keep doing it until you realize that this thing didn’t kill you after all. All right?”

            “Yes sir,” said Carrot. “Thank you, sir.”

            “Don’t mention it. Out of curiosity, what were you and Sally actually doing?”

            “I was taking a fly out of her eye, sir.”

            Vimes let it drop. If that was his story, no doubt he was wise to stick to it.

           

            Back at Pseudopolis Yard, Vimes sent Carrot out to the training grounds to break in a batch of new recruits who had been waiting for some real truncheon work. Carrot was good at teaching. Next, he went and found Reg who told him that Angua was waiting upstairs in his office and that Corporal Humperding was across the street in the old lemonade factory. Vimes nodded in approval and went to have a word with Angua.

            “I don’t want to hear it, okay?” she said as soon as he’d walked through the door.

            “All right. I won’t say it,” said Vimes. “Your business is your business. But my business is copperin’ and I still need your help. Ringfounder and Washpot found some more people like the ones last night. Drained, violent, and dangerous. Sounds like there’s still some more out there though. Could be it’s spreading. Carrot tells me the house was a dead end, so for now we just have to hang tight and hope something turns up. But one pair hunting these Drained isn’t enough. I want you to partner with Constable Haddock. You’ve worked well together in the past.”

            “Yes sir,” said Angua, contritely.

            “Good. Now get out there and be a copper.”

            Vimes then had much the same conversation with Sally, except that he chose to partner her with Constable Bluejohn. The big troll could be relied upon not to gossip.

            Then he returned to his office and continued to attack his small mountain of paperwork. About seven minutes after he sat down, however, there came a heavy knock at the door.

            “Come in,” said Vimes, laying down his pen.

            Sergeant Detritus entered the room, significantly reducing the amount of unoccupied space. The troll saluted smartly, drawing a smile from Vimes. Detritus was dependable.

            “And what can I do for you, Sargent?”

            “Captain Carrot told me 'bout da people who killed Mr. Jingler, sir,” said Detritus in his thick, gravelly tones. “He said dat dey was kinda empty inna head.”

            “Yes…” said Vimes, sensing that the troll had information to share.

            “Well sir, you know how I got some ‘little birdies’ in da Alchemists’ Guild, right?”

            “Yes,” said Vimes again. Renegade alchemists were notorious for peddling troll drugs and Detritus had long ago made the trade the target of his personal crusade. Together with his reformed junkie protégé, Lance-corporal Brick, the Sergeant had brought the illegal pipelines of Slab, Slide, and Slunky to a virtual halt.

            “Well, one of dem, he sends me a little tip off dat da Alchemists’ just got a new recipe, called a plum bob.”

            “Plum bob?” said Vimes, nonplussed.

            “Yes sir. ‘Cause it taste like plums, see?”

            “But what does it do, Sergeant?”

            “Well, you know how when someone get real _groopa_ drunk, right? And dey can’t tell dat somefing’s a very bad idea? Well, dis like dat only wid out all da fallin’ down and pukin’ and dat.”

            It took a little more explaining, but eventually Vimes thought he understood. Plum bob was an alchemical substance, not a drug exactly, but more like a poison. It could be absorbed directly through the skin, and once it was, it sheared off the person’s inhibitions as cleanly as a knife cutting cheese. It also amplified emotion, freed up repressed desires, and caused a peculiar sort of selective amnesia.

            It sounded suspiciously similar to the symptoms of the Drained.

            “Any evidence to suggest they’re been selling it?” asked Vimes.

            “No sir,” said Detritus. “’Cept these Drained popping up everywhere, sir.”

            Well, there was that of course…

**~**

 

[1] The last four words had been added some weeks ago in red paint by a lance-corporal who was now spending his foreseeable future patrolling the sewers and tannery district.

[2] An Uberwaldean word meaning, “Oh bugger, my nose just froze.”


	13. The Hags Upon the Hill

Dusk had deepened into true night and still the companions journeyed on. Mist lay behind them, thick among the trees below, and brooded on the pale margins of the Anduin. Yet the sky above was clear, dusted with the silver pepper of the stars. A waxing moon had risen in the east and gave them light enough to travel without fear of falling, but the tall rocks cast black shadows. They were come to the feet of stony hills, and their pace slowed, for the trail they followed grew thin and ragged. It was as they crested a small rise that overlooked one of the many gullies of that bony land that Legolas bid the others halt.

            “Do you see that high ridge against the sky? There is a light upon it, a red light as of fire.”

            “I see it also,” said Aragorn. “The light is small but I do not think it very distant.”

            “Do you suppose it to be a single torch, or the fire of a whole camp?” Legolas asked quietly.

            “It is a campfire,” said Gimli, confidently.

            The others looked at him and he snorted. “Elves and Dúnedain may see clearer than most, but a dwarf’s eyes are made for the dark.”

            “How large a fire is it?” asked Aragorn.

            “Quite small,” the dwarf replied. “Enough for three or maybe four.”

            Aragorn nodded. “I doubt they are the orcs we seek, though it is possible that they are some small band that has deserted. Whatever the case, they may have seen something of use to us.”

            “Let us come upon them stealthily,” said Legolas.

            Gimli nodded and loosened his axe in his belt. “Aye, and we’d best be wary too. Stranger things than orcs prowl in the lonely hills.”

**~**

            Granny Weatherwax frowned at the small fire without seeming to notice it. Tiffany wondered what she might see, dancing in the flames.

            Tiffany was trying to write a letter to send to Roland, which was proving more difficult than she’d expected. She used to write to him all the time when she was studying with Mrs. Pullunder and Old Miss Treason. But lately…lately, things with Roland were strange. His aunts had been sent packing and his father was as well as Tiffany could have hoped, but Roland was growing more and more distant. Every day he seemed more like a baron and less like the clumsy, red-faced boy who had given her the silver horse that day on the green downs.

            Beside her, Nanny Ogg was frowning at another shamble. The expression looked out of place on her cheerfully wrinkled face.

            “This can’t be right,” she said, prodding the end of a forked twig with one finger. “It’s as though we’d flown thousands of miles in a single night. I can’t even find…”

            She was cut off as, in the distance, they heard a long wolf’s howl turn suddenly into a high-pitched yip of pain. Nanny shook her head.

            “Greebo.”

            She put down the shamble and brought out her omnipresent bottle of scumble. She uncorked it with a pop and a smell of apples, and took a long drink.

            Tiffany put away the unfinished letter and turned to Granny Weatherwax.

            “What was that thing you burned?”

            Granny looked up from the flames and to Tiffany’s mild surprise, answered.

            “I don’t rightly know. It was a man once, or the memory of a man, but it hadn’t been human for a long time. And it was dangerous, very dangerous, but afraid of something else that it served. Something even worse.”

            “Worse than the Hiver?” asked Tiffany. “Worse than the Queen?”

            “Yes,” said Granny. “Worse even than that.”

            “Coo,” said Nanny Ogg.

            At that moment, You came racing into the circle of firelight and sprang into Granny’s lap. Granny stroked her absently as she peered into the cat’s eyes. Abruptly, she looked up.

            “There’s folk coming. Must’ve seen our fire.”

            “Who are they?” asked Tiffany.

            “One’s human, one’s a dwarf, and the other looks almost like an elf.”

            “An elf?” said Nanny. “I thought you’d knocked those uppity bastards straight back to Fairyland.”

            “I said he looks like an elf, Gytha. But he’s wearing iron.”

            “Are they armed?” asked Tiffany, fingering the silver horse. Granny glanced back at You’s eyes as though reading them.

            “Yes. Could be heroes, could be bandits. We’ll just have to see.”

**~**

            Cautiously, Aragorn stepped forward into the yellow ring of firelight, his hands spread before him to show he held no weapon. On the far side of the little campfire, seated in a semicircle, were three women. Upon their heads they wore pointed black hats with broad brims, and the older two wore black dresses and cloaks besides. They regarded the companions levelly.

            “And who might you be, young man?” said the woman on the far left. She held herself very straight and her blue eyes shone keenly in her hatchet of a face.

            “I am called Strider,” he answered.

            “Called but not named, I notice,” she sniffed. “Very well. Who are your companions?”

            Legolas bowed low. “My name is Legolas, Warden of the Greenwood.”

            “Gimli, Gloin’s son, at you service,” offered the dwarf.

            “Please mistresses,” said Aragonr. “We are following a party of orcs down from the falls of Rawros. They hold two of our company captive, two halflings. They would be children to your eyes. Have you seen aught of them?”

            The woman in the center, who was short and plump and wrinkled, shook her head sorrowfully.

            “’Fraid not, love. But we can offer you a place by the fire and something hot to drink, I don’t doubt.”

            “I thank you,” replied Aragorn. “But we have no time. We must seek the orcs’ trail, in darkness or in light, if we are to overtake them.”

            He turned to leave, and Gimli and Legolas made to follow him.

            “Wait.”

            The companions turned. It was the youngest woman who had spoken. Beneath her cloak, her dress was spring green and her chestnut hair was long and fine. She looked scarcely out of girlhood. She spoke now to the proud, blue-eyed woman.

            “Granny, we could help them find their friends. We could look for them in the water.”

**~**

            Tiffany carefully pounded three wooden stakes in a tight triangle around the small campfire and hung the cauldron from them.

            The cauldron consisted of a triangular section of supple leather with ties at each corner, bowed in the middle to hold water. This was the cauldron of the dawn times, before people had cast iron or beaten bronze. It had been a gift from Jeanie last Hogswatch and it had met with the senior witches’ approval because it a) did not sparkle and b) could be used to cook with.

            Nanny tipped a jug full of cold spring water into the leather triangle and added a pinch of bathing salts, which wasn’t necessary but smelled nice, while Granny Weatherwax drew a circle in the earth around the fire with a long stick.

            Most books on magic show magical circles surrounded by strange and eldritch runes. These are generally about as useful as a chocolate screwdriver. Humans invented runes. But a circle… The Disc is a circle. The year is a circle, after a fashion. Circles are old. Circles have power.

            Granny pulled a bottle of ink from her cloak and poured in just enough to turn the simmering water black.

            Tiffany turned to the man called Strider, who was watching the preparations intently.

            “Do you have anything that belonged to your friends? It would help the spell a lot.”

            Strider reached into his belt pouch and brought out a silver brooch shaped like a leaf. Tiffany took it and placed it on the open palm of her right hand, over the black water of the cauldron, which had reached a slow rolling boil. Beside the brooch an old scar still showed palely the shape of the white horse.

            Tiffany opened her eyes and then opened her eyes again.

            The water cleared to show a high mountain pass with a view of the Sto Plains. Through the pass streamed a horde of savage looking trolls. At their head marched a great black troll carrying a club nearly as large as himself. Beside him walked two men, strangely dressed, and carrying suitcases. And just behind them…

            “That’s them!” said the dwarf excitedly, pointing a gauntleted finger at the two figures riding piggyback on a pair of massive trolls.

            “Yes,” Strider agreed, “But who are those that bear them? Even Saruman has never gathered trolls in such numbers.”

            “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Granny tartly. “I expects they gathered themselves. But if they stay on that path, they’ll be heading right for Ankh-Morpork.

**~**


	14. Chapter XIV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which We Discover the Varying Uses of Stones and Our Heroes Confront Their Mortality…

When Pooh awoke, he was somewhat disappointed to discover that their visitors had gone, but Fool explained that they had a long way to go and wanted to get an early start. Their provisions were gone, so they had to forage for breakfast. Piglet found some wild gooseberry bushes and Pooh caught three fat fish out of the river. Best of all, Fool located a bee’s nest and with a torch of green sage stems and twigs he smoked out the bees and brought back several slabs of honey comb. Once they had eaten, they set off in a westerly direction.

            When they stopped to rest, which happened fairly often, Fool would bring out the little wooden figures he was carving. They looked like dolls to Pooh. There were seven of them in all, still very rough, but gradually gaining lifelike features as Fool whittled busily.

            To pass the time as they walked, Pooh decided to tell Fool the story of the Brain of Pooh and the Flood. Fool seemed to enjoy it and Piglet helped fill in the bits that Pooh forgot.

            After that Piglet, not to be outdone, told Fool the story of the House at Pooh-Corner where Eeyore lived. This reminded Pooh of the day they’d found Eeyore floating by the bridge where they’d played Pooh Sticks, and so Fool had to be told that story as well.

            Fool smiled and laughed in all the right places, but around twelve o’clock he called a halt to the storytelling so that they could stop and eat their lunch of fruit and honeycomb.

            They rested in the shade of a tall stone, standing upright on a little hill and overgrown with climbing flowers. As Pooh and Piglet finished their lunches, Fool whittled away at his figures. At last, he seemed satisfied with them and he arranged them in a row on a flat rock. Pooh peered at them closely. One was slim and graceful, with a face that made Pooh shiver. The next wore a long hooded robe that hid its face completely. The third held a broken sword and the fourth a handful of flame. Pooh looked away. Something about the little wooden people made him very nervous.

            “What are they?” asked Piglet. Fool shook his head.

            “Nightmares. I keep seeing them in my sleep. I thought making them solid might help somehow.”

            “Oh no,” said a cold voice from the hilltop, “I’m afraid that we are far, far worse in person.”

**~**

            “So you came here by Greystone?” I asked. Not that I thought I’d misheard him, mind you. Some things are just worth asking twice.

            I was sitting with a blanket wrapped around me to conceal my nakedness, while my clothes hung close enough to the fire to dry without burning. Across from me sat my rescuer, in a similar state of undress. His wolf lay beside him, as did his battle-axe. I guessed him to be about ten years my senior, but it was hard to tell. His body was lean and crisscrossed with old scars.

            For my part, I’d retrieved the sword I’d dropped and it now lay within easy reach, glimmering with sullen menace. My lute case had fallen from me as I ran, so apart from the sword, it was the only piece of my luggage that had been spared a soaking.

            “They’re called Skill Stones where I come from,” the man replied. He’d told me to call him Fitz, but I was unsure whether that was his real name. “I’ve traveled by them before. I just didn’t think I could do it without trying.”

            “Skill Stones?” I asked. “Why are they called that?”

            “The Skill is a magic that runs in the Royal family. It is also the magic in these stones, as far as I’ve been able to tell.”

            “What else could it be?” I asked, curiously. I wanted to know whether he’d ever heard of sympathy, but did not want to ask directly. I’d never heard of the Six Duchies, yet he spoke Aturan better than Wilem who’d been studying here for years.

            “It might have something to do with the Wit,” he said, as though revealing a dirty secret.

            “What’s the Wit?”

            “Some call it the Old Blood. It is a magic of birds and beasts, though it works well enough on men.”

            “Is that how you chased off those little monsters?”

            “Yes. Nighteyes helped. He can add his strength to mine when we work magic. They would call him my Wit-beast. They would burn us both alive, given the chance.”

            “Who’s they?”

            “The folk back home. But they’re a world away now.”

            “Could you get back there if you tried?” I wanted to see this magic for myself. “Could you take me?”

            “I could try…” he said dubiously.

            “Come on. What do we have to lose?”

            “Our lives,” he said grimly, but his words lacked conviction.

            I checked that my clothes were dry, then dressed and put my still slightly damp travel sack on over Fela’s cloak. I tied the sword back into its improvised scabbard and picked up my lute case. Fitz shook his head, but also began to pack up. I put out the fire, taking care to leave no stray embers, and then I joined him and the wolf by the greystone.

            Carefully, Fitz pricked the back of his hand with a bone needle, waiting for the blood to bead up. I picked up a pebble and focused my Alar, drawing on the heat in the sun-warmed stones along both banks of the river. I muttered a second binding that connected me to Fitz. It was designed to keep two objects at the same distance from each other, without locking either of them in a particular position. I’d done it with two candles back in Elxa Dal’s class. The candles could be rotated, flipped, even lit or melted down without one affecting the other…until you tried to carry one away. I hoped the binding would be enough to keep me from being left behind.

            Fitz’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment and the wolf growled, low in its throat. He slowly extended his hand and pressed two bloodied fingertips against the greystone.

            The world blurred.

**~**

            We appeared on the top of a small hill in the midst of a springtime scrubland. The tall skill stone that we had appeared from was at our backs and before us…my jaw dropped.

            It was the Fool. He was slightly darker than when we’d parted, his once moon-white skin now closer to buttermilk. He wore a long traveling cloak over his faded motley and he carried a heavy ash stave. In his left earlobe was the freeman’s earring Patience had given me.

            I was so overwhelmed that it took me a moment to absorb the rest of the scene. The Fool stood in a fighter’s crouch, shielding a small bear and even smaller pig from seven strangers who surrounded them in a half circle. The strangers’ faces were hard and cruel, save for the tallest of them whose face was hidden by the shadows of his deep cowl.

            “The Chandrian!” gasped Kvothe beside me.

            “The who?” I whispered, quietly unslinging my poacher’s bow. They were some distance from us, as though the Fool and his companions had been trying to flee. As yet, our arrival had not been noticed.

            “The seven most dangerous bastards that walk under the sun,” the red-haired youth told me. “I don’t even know if they _can_ be killed.”

            At that instant, one of the seven—pale as the Fool had been in his days at Buckkeep—sprang forward, drawing a long sword. The Fool lashed out wildly with his stave.

            “I’m willing to try,” I snarled and loosed an arrow.

            It caught the pale man just below the collarbone and he stumbled. The Fool struck him hard across the face. I flung my bow down and charged, bringing up my battle-axe as I went. An animal snarl tore from my throat as I bowled into one of them, knocking her sideways. She spun around inhumanly fast and seized me by the throat. I tried to hack her legs from under her, but the axe blade crunched dully and splintered into rust. The blow still had enough force to send her sprawling and I _repelled_ at her with all my strength. She dropped away, releasing my neck.

            _“Behind you, Brother!”_ screamed Nighteyes. I backhanded my unseen attacker with the haft of my ruined axe. It crumbled into rotten pieces under the force of the impact, but Nighteyes howled and sprang at my assailant, bearing him to the ground.

            A man, ashen-faced and dead-eyed as though he suffered from a raging fever, dodged around their tangled bodies and ran at me. I blasted at him with the Wit, but this time my wild _repelling_ barely seemed to slow him down. In desperation, I _Skilled_ at him. As my mind touched his, a dizzying welter of images raced across my mind’s eye. A withered tree. A long silk dress crumbling into rags. A severed hog’s head, black with flies and corruption.

            I shoved against the flood of consciousness and emptied my own pain into him. I filled him with all the hollow grief and impotent fury that glimpsing Molly had brought to the forefront of my mind. The sudden shock of it drove the grey-faced man to his knees.

            Up stepped Kvothe, as if on cue, and slashed at the kneeling man with his palely glowing longsword. There was a hiss, like a white-hot poker striking water, and dark oily smoke began to billow from a gash running from the man’s shoulder to his hip.

            The other strangers froze, staring.

            “What is that weapon?” one demanded of the hooded man but he only shook his head.

            “Destroy it!”

            The woman I’d struck first sprang up and darted at Kvothe. He stabbed at her but she reached out and seized the blade in both hands. There was an explosion of blue fire and black smoke. The woman reeled back, keening in pain, her hands charred and brittle. Kvothe flung the hilt of his ruined sword, rusted and smoking, to the earth.

            Faster than the others, the pale man leapt forward. He’d torn the arrow from his chest without apparent injury and I could see now that his eyes were black and featureless, more like a goat’s than a man’s. He kicked Nighteyes viciously off his comrade, making me yelp with the shared pain, and with quicksilver grace he sprang over the wolf at Kvothe.

            Kvothe turned to him, something held in both hands, and gave the man a feral smile. Then he brought the something down across his knees. I heard wood snap and the pale man’s dark eyes went wide with sudden pain. He toppled backwards, all litheness gone, to fall at a bizarre angle. His spine was clearly broken.

            “Enough,” said the hooded man, and he raised both hands before him.

            Long tongues of shadow lashed out, and he and the other six vanished, more suddenly than blowing out a candle.

**~**

            I let the fragments of the wooden mommet fall from my trembling fingers and looked around warily. I doubted that we’d managed to kill any of the Chandrian, but I wasn’t certain. I was more than a little stunned to find myself still alive.

            Fitz had finished checking over Nighteyes and crossed to where the pale stranger knelt by the fallen bear. I followed quickly, grabbing my kit bag from the Medica. I wasn’t sure it would do much good. I’d never had to treat a stuffed animal before.

            There was a short tear in his right side where the tip of Cinder’s sword had nicked him. It didn’t look life threatening, but when I peered closer, I saw the truth. A dark mold was spreading through his sawdust.

            “Rot…” I said softly.

            “What?” said Fitz.

            “One of the Chandrian spreads rot. It must have gotten inside the wound.”

            “It’s not so bad,” the bear said, muzzily. “I can’t feel it at all.”

            “That’s not a good sign. You’re probably going into shock. Don’t try to move.” I turned to Fitz. “We need to keep him warm. Get one of the blankets and your tinderbox. Hurry.”

            He nodded and ran off. I turned to the pale man. Well, probably he was a man. I was beginning to feel like it wasn’t the day to make basic assumptions.

            “Do you have any sugar in your pack? Anything sweet? It might help.”

            He nodded and pulled a chunk of dark gold honeycomb wrapped in a green leaf from his travel sack.

            “Mix it with water,” I said, rummaging through my kit bag. I swiftly estimated the nawlroot dosage for a person barely one-fifth my height and measured it out. I stirred it into the leather jack the pale man handed me. I muttered a binding, sending enough of my own heat into the draught to make it warm.

            I made the bear drink all of it and wrapped him in the blanket Fitz brought me. I had no idea how much sawdust he could safely lose, so rather than risk bleeding him to death I sprinkled the hole with a powerful antiseptic and stitched it up with gut.

            Once we had the fire going, I took time out for a round of introductions. The bear was Winnie-the-Pooh, the pig was—appropriately—Piglet, and the pale fellow in the faded motley was called the Fool. He and Fitz seemed to know each other, but after my long day, I was barely surprised.

            I didn’t like the idea of hanging around for the Chandrian to return but I didn’t want to move Pooh. Even after the danger of shock was past, we had to wait for the lethargy from the nawlroot to run its course.

            Dusk began to fall and he looked no better, drifting in and out of a feverish sleep.

            “He’s getting warmer,” I said, laying the back of my hand against his forehead. The pig was sitting with us, holding his paw. “That’s a bad sign.”

            “Um…” said Fitz in a strained voice.

            I turned.

            Standing at the edge of our makeshift camp was a tall figure in a cowled black robe. But it wasn’t Haliaax. Its eyes shone, cold and blue, in the empty sockets of its skull. It carried an enormous scythe and a bundle of ornate hourglasses.

            “Ah,” I said. “Well, that’s a bad sign too.”

**~**


	15. Chapter 15

“Enter,” called Lord Vetinari in a coolly neutral voice, just as Vimes raised his hand to knock at the door of the Oblong Office.

            “He could have waited,” said Vimes, slightly plaintively to his Lordship’s clerk, Drumknott. Drumknott only smiled faintly. Vimes went in.

            The tyrannical despot of Ankh-Morpork[1] sat at his desk surrounded by bits of paper that were, presumably, very important. Vimes noted that the stone Thud board had been replaced by a deceptively simple-looking game using red and black stones. The Patrician pressed his Stygium ring into a puddle of black sealing wax, and looked up at Vimes.

            “Ah Commander. Pray have a seat. I hope this little meeting is not inconveniencing you.”

            “No sir,” said Vimes impassively.

            “How is Captain Carrot holding up?”

            “Fine, thank you sir.” Vimes wasn’t even surprised. Vetinari knew very nearly everything.

            “Hmm,” said Vetinari, looking at Vimes as though he were peering through him. “I hope you are right, Commander. Are you aware that there are some two-hundred heavily armed trolls camped just outside the city?”

            “Yes sir. They arrived late last night, sir.”

            “Who commands them?”

            “Chief Rockglass commands the trolls, sir, but he works for Lord Wooster.”

            “Who is this Lord Wooster?”

            “Some kind of tourist, as far as I can make out.”

            “And by what authority does he claim his title?”

            “The authority of two-hundred heavily armed trolls, I expect,” said Vimes.

            Vetinari nodded. “What do you know of his manservant?”

            “The valet? Not much. Willikins says he’s 'is nephew.”

            “I have reason to believe that he may also be one of the three most dangerous men in this city,” said Vetinari, casually. “But I fear that is likely to be my own problem, not yours. And now I must ask you how your investigations into the murder of Mr. Jingler are progressing.”

            “We are looking into the matter with all available resources,” said Vimes, automatically.

            “That’s not enough, Sam,” said Vetinari, picking up a letter opener. “The Beggars’ Guild has complained twice already and rumors are spreading about these Drained. Reports of attacks are mounting. Tell me what leads you have.”

            Vimes told him about the plumbob and Detritus’ suspicions.

            “That sounds very plausible,” the Patrician agreed. “Do you need authorizations for arrests?”

            “I don’t know, sir. This doesn’t feel like the Alchemists. There’s no money in it, no new discoveries. Just mayhem.”

            “But unless you discover some more conclusive evidence to the contrary, we will need to move against them, Vimes.”

            Vimes nodded. “Give me three days, my lord.”

            “One day, Vimes. Twenty-four hours and then my clerks come for them. Do you understand?”

            “Yes sir.”

            “Excellent. Don’t let me detain you.”

            Vimes left.

            A little while later, Drumknott entered with an urgent clacks from Maer Allveron. Another busy day…

**~**

            I believe that in one of my earlier narratives I touched on the subject of rubber ducks in the bath vis. their ability to brighten up an otherwise rather frightful day. I mention this because on the first morning of my stay in Ankh-Morpork I was gratified to discover that the bath of my commodious flat contained not a mere waterfowl, but a floating rubber hippo. I can’t remember when I’ve extracted more solid amusement from anything.

            When the water began to grow tepid, I emerged, dressed myself in the gent’s blue-grey suit Jeeves had set out, and had a spot of breakfast. Jeeves had already gone off to hobnob with his uncle Willikins, so upon completion of the morning repast, I collected hat and stick and prepared to put in a couple solid hours’ sightseeing.

            I visited the Royal Art Gallery, where they have a round room showing a lot of trolls and short bearded chappies having a bit of a dustup, and the Tower of Art up by Unseen University, and I even got a peek at the Colossus of Ankh, designed by the noted architect B.S. Johnson. The curator kept it in his coat pocket, of all bizarre ideas.

            I lunched at _Le Fois Heureux_ and ordered something called _Brodequin oti Façon Ombres_ that I’m sure even Anatolé would have been proud to sponsor.

            After lunch, I went to the Opera House, a largish marble building with a policeman guarding it from theft, and saw a show. It was all in Ubërwaldian but a nearly as I could ascertain it was about two chaps who were travelling somewhere in order to do something, only the first chap had a gel back home and wasn’t so hot on leaving. The other bloke seemed a bit put out by this and then a woman in horns turned up and so on and so forth.

            It was getting lateish when I left the opera house, but I thought I’d just pop off and have a quick drink before hoofing it back to the flat to change for dinner. The tavern I stopped at proclaimed itself to be the Mended Drum, in moderately shaky handwriting.

            As I drew near the door, a biggish bloke in chainmail flew out of it backwards at a considerable rate of mph. He hit the cobbles, bounced once, and said, “Damn. That’s another six points for Thundergust’s Brawlers. But you wait 'til the knife play. We’ll turn things around, just you watch.”

            The interior was awash with heroes, trolls, dwarves, thieves, and drunks of several varieties. By dint of poking people with my walking stick, I reached the bar, and sat down between an off duty rozzer and an orangutan. Both of them were regarding their glasses with somber moodiness.

            “Hello, hello, hello…” I said brightly, for it is my invariable policy, when confronted with a long face to try my best to ease the burden of care from the unfortunate face’s shoulders, if you follow me. “Might I buy you both a drink?”

            “Ook,” said the orangutan, registering S.M. as before, and the copper nodded dully. I ordered us three whiskey-and-sodas and made a round of introductions. The aforementioned copper, who had gingery hair and was built rather along the lines of Heracles, was called Carrot and when on duty was a captain. The orangutan was the Librarian up at UU, which seemed to be undergoing a spot of magical bother.

            The whiskey-and-splash ran out pretty quickly, so I ordered us another round. As I drank, I found myself warming to these two immensely. I couldn’t remember an ape and a constable who had struck me more forcefully as the right sort.

            “Carrot,” I said as I started on my third drink, “I like your face.”

            He thanked me and said he liked mine as well.

            “I mean to say, that it’s an honest face. I can tell just by looking at it that you are honest.”

            He said he was glad and that my face was honest too.

            “But even though you’ve got this honest face,” I continued, perhaps a trifle muzzily, “You don’t seem happy.”

            He shook his head slowly and said, “No Bertie, I suppose I don’t.”

            I thought for a moment. “Well, the point, the point that I’m trying to make, is…why?”

            “Well,” he said slowly. “There’s this girl, see?”

            “Which girl?”

            “This girl I’m talking about.”

            “Yes, of course. Pray continue.”

            “Well, there’s this girl, see? She’s in the Watch, yeah, and…and she’s a werewolf.”

            This surprised me. “A werewolf?”

            “A werewolf,” he confirmed. “Only 's'alright 'cause…’cause of racial politics. And she’s beautiful.”

            “Yes?”

            “Yes. Most beautiful woman in the wolf…I mean, world. And I love her and she loved me, but…”

            “But?”

            “But she thinks she saw me kissing this vampire, only I didn’t, and it’s all gone phut.”

            “What, all gone phut?”          

            “Totally, phut.”

            I clicked the tongue sympathetically. My readers will remember that something similar once happened to a pal of mine named Gussie Finknottle, and I knew how these lovers tiff’s can take it out of a chap. We talked a bit more and then I bid my new friends pip-pip and toddled off back to the manse.

            The hobbits, it seemed, were still out looking for transport to the Shire, but Jeeves had returned and was busily messing about in the little kitchenette.

            “Are we dining in, Jeeves?” I asked as I shed the outer layer of the civilized crust.

            “I think it would be advisable, sir. From what I gathered at his Grace’s house, there has been some unrest in the city of late.”

            “Ah well, just as you like. I’m about done in for the day as it is.”

            We supped together, since it seemed too dashed silly for Jeeves to play waiter for only one. He’d made a toothsome soup and a salad with slices of wahooni, a local fruit. As we ate, I told him about Carrot’s predicament.

            “Most distressing, sir,” he said when I had finished.

            “Quite Jeeves. And it’s not as though he can try pleading with the gel. She may well turn wolf on him and bite his face off.”

            “I can readily appreciate the difficulty. Still, it might be possible for me to accomplish something.”

            “You mean you have a wheeze?”

            “An idea, certainly, sir.”

            “Does it involve finesse?”

            “Just so, sir. And it hinges upon the psychology of the individual.”

            I smiled. “Say no more, Jeeves. I can tell already; it’s going to be a winner.”

**~**

            Up in his office, Vimes stared at the treacherously ticking clock without seeing it, resting the weight of his head against the heel of his palm.

            He’d met some of the alchemists over the years. A few were money-hungry madmen, who’d joined up to chase the dream of gold, but most were hardworking, well-meaning people. A few of them even paid their taxes. They didn’t deserve the threat of the Tanty hanging over them, even if they did use complicated names for chemicals like table salt and well water. Compared to the Thieves, the Assassins, and the Lawyers, the Alchemists were practically civilized. But they had no other leads…

            There was a knock at his door. Cheery came in, carrying a leather scroll case.

            “This just came for you, sir.”

            Vimes took it cautiously. “Who left it?”

            “A tall man in a grey cloak, sir. I didn’t see his face.”

            “Any weapons?”

            “Staff and sword, sir. Not a make I recognized.”

            “Not an assassin then. Downey won’t let them carry swords.”

            Vimes gave a mental shrug and opened the case. Poisonous vapors entirely failed to billow out. Instead, Vimes found a tight roll of velum. He smoothed it out and saw that it was covered in strange, flowing characters, with a faintly glowing rune at the bottom, like a signature.

            Vimes frowned and pulled the Gooseberry from his pocket. The little wooden box held a pale green imp, who had been Vimes’ bane and occasional assistant since Sybil had bought it for him.

            “Gooseberry,” said Vimes. “What’s that lot mean when it’s at home?”

            “Ooh, ooh, let me see…” said the imp as it leaned in to peer at the parchment.

            “It’s written in Quendi, old Elvish to the layman. Very posh. It reads, ‘Search you right well the basement/dungeon of three thirty-nine Heron Street. There lies the seed of your woe. Bring you stalwart men (denoting soldiers) who are skilled in the arts of war.’”

            “It’s a tipoff?” asked Vimes.

            “Yes, (insert-name-here),” the imp replied.

            “What about that mark at the bottom?”

            “It’s a ‘G’ rune, (insert-name-here). Someone is using it as their personal seal.”

**~**

 

[1] Or, to put it another way, the proverbial “man” in “One man, one vote.”


	16. A Day of Steel and Fire

Aragorn slept fitfully that night, not so much from fear of their new companions, as from a deep disquiet. As Strider he had ranged far and wide through Middle Earth and he had studied many ancient maps in the house of Elrond. Yet nowhere in his experience had he heard tell of this city, Ankh-Morpork. It troubled his mind. Yet if Merry and Pippin were born thither he was resolved to follow them.

            They rose with the Sun and broke their fast with humble traveler’s fare. It did not escape his notice that the witch-women seemed wary of Legolas, far more than they were of Gimli or himself.

            When they had finished their meal, they unmade the meager campsite and departed. The witch-women rode broomsticks that flew through the air more swiftly than a horse could run. They slowed however and stayed close to the earth so that the three companions could follow them on foot.

            To reach the city, Mistress Weatherwax told them, they would have to make their way down out of the hill country and cross the wide Sto Plains. By midmorning, the ground they covered was grown quite flat, level—or so it seemed—with the horizon. Yet Aragorn knew that the sea of green before them was no tableland but a series of low rolling mounds. The grasses were thicker here but still greyed and hardy, like the stubble of an old man’s beard, and soil was broken by outcroppings of jagged stone.

            They had traveled but a little farther when Aragorn stumbled as though a yawning pit had opened beneath his feet. Legolas seized him by the arm and hauled him back.

            “What happened?” asked the elf. “Loose stones?”

            “Nay,” said Gimli, peering at the earth. “Look!”

            With a blow of his axe, he sheared away the long grasses and tangled roots that had obscured a narrow, winding gulley of stone, nearly neck deep on a man.

            “This is gryke country then,” said Aragorn.

            “Aye,” agreed the dwarf. “This little gryke is narrower than most, or the grass could never have hidden it. Still, there are few that a man could not leap. They will riddle the ground, though, like the gaps between flagstones. Watch where you tread.”

            They moved more cautiously through the rocky gryke-land, hopping over the little chasms where they barred the way. Above them, the witch-women slowed to match their pace. They had promised to guide them, and guide them they would.

            It must have been nearly noon, though dark clouds had blown up out of the east, casting the lands into an early twilight, when the attack came. As the companions drew near the lip of the next gryke, a gout of yellow flame leapt up. They shied back in amazement, but more flames burst from the gryke behind them. As the fires before them died away, four dark shapes hauled themselves from the stony trench.

            They looked to be dwarves, clad from head to toe in black mail, their faces hidden by dark visors. Two gripped double-headed axes, sharp and heavy. The others wore weighty packs that were connected to long lances that they bore before them. A heavy stink of lamp oil clung to them and tiny points of fire flickered at the lances’ tips.

**~**

            “We’ve got to help them!” cried Tiffany, staring down at the three travelers. All across the plain, dark squat figures were scrambling from the network of rocky gulches. It looked like someone had kicked an ants’ nest, but these ants fought with steel and fire.

            “No we bloody don’t!” snapped Granny as she swung her broom around to bar Tiffany’s descent. “Those are the Dark Dwarfs, fanatics in iron armor, and they’ve brought fire-flingers besides. Fire and broomsticks don’t mix.”

            “Not much we can do, Tiff,” agreed Nanny Ogg. “'Cept get killed, o’ course.”

            “We could carry them off,” suggested Tiffany.

            “Not fast enough,” said Granny firmly. “Dwarves makes broomsticks, remember? And bloody good crossbows too. We’d never make it flyin’ double.”

            Tiffany cursed silently. If only the feegles were here…

            “All right,” she sighed. “Let’s go.”

            The three witches swung their brooms in the direction of Ankh-Morpork and sped away.

**~**

            Death walked into our camp, as slow and stately as nightfall. His dark robe swirled about him but beneath his cowl his eyes shone like distant stars. Their cold light played along the blade of his great scythe and glittered off the silver cases of the half-dozen hourglasses that hung at his waist.

            “PLEASE EXCUSE THE INTRUSION,” said Death. “I AM AFRAID WE DO NOT HAVE MUCH TIME.”

            “Time for what?” I asked, almost at the same moment the boy Kvothe asked, “Are you here for the bear?”

            “YES,” replied Death.

            The Fool put his hand on my arm, though whether to check me or for the comfort it gave, I do not know. Death knelt beside the makeshift bed where Winnie-the-Pooh tossed and turned.

            “HE IS DYING. YOUR EFFORTS HAVE ONLY DELAYED THE ROT’S SPREAD LONG ENOUGH FOR ME TO ARRIVE.”

            “Arrive?” Kvothe asked, “Wouldn’t you have shown up anyway? When he…”

            “NO,” said Death. “THERE ARE POWERS SEEKING THIS ONE. THEY LAID WASTE TO HIS HOME. NOW THEY SEEK HIS LIFE. THEY MUST NOT HAVE HIM.”

            “I’m sorry,” I said, “But aren’t you…Death? I thought you’d be in favor of people dying.”

            “DYING AT THEIR TIME, YES. BUT NOW ALL TIMES RUN TOGETHER. ALL PLACES BECOME ONE. THEY MUST BE SEPARATED, BEFORE THE ONE CAN BE UNMADE. AND THIS BEAR,” he pointed one long, skeletal finger at Pooh, “IS THE KEY.”

            “Does that mean you’ll fix him?” Kvothe asked.

            “I CANNOT. BUT I WILL TAKE HIM TO ONE WHO CAN.”

            “Where?” the Fool asked.

            “HE STAYS IN ANKH-MORPORK, FAR TO THE WEST.”

            Kvothe shook his head. “He’ll never survive the journey.”

            Death reached into the bundle of hourglasses and from the very center pulled a single one with a case of worked gold. It was empty, but when he gently tucked it into Pooh’s paws, it began to fill with glowing sand.

            “Whose is that?” I asked.

            “MY OWN,” said Death, “HE’S LIVING ON BORROWED TIME.”

**~**

            “Kill the sword-bearer,” snarled one of the flame-carrying dwarves. His voice was muffled by his helm and visor and he spoke in a dialect of dwarvish unfamiliar to Aragorn’s ears, though the meaning of the words was plain.

            The other flame-carrier shouldered his lance and sent a long stream of fire whistling at Aragorn. The ranger dodged left, drawing Anduríl as he did. Lifting the sword, he rushed at his attackers crying, “Elendíl! Elendíl!”

            With a fell stroke of his sword, he laid open the vessel of the nearest flame-carrier. Burning oil spilled forth, consuming the dark dwarf utterly. One of the axe-wielding dwarves moved to bar Aragorn’s path, but Anduríl flashed again and the dwarf dropped to his knees, clutching at the bloody stump of his wrist. The second flame-carrier leveled his weapon at Aragorn’s chest.

            Legolas was swifter. An arrow took the dwarf below the ribs and he toppled backwards into the gryke. Gimili cut the legs out from under their last assailant, but already more were clambering from the gryke behind them.

            “Run!” cried Legolas and, light as a windblown leaf, the elf sprang over the gulley and was away. The others followed him and their foes gave chase.

            A crossbow bolt flew past Aragorn’s ear to shatter on a rocky outcrop and another snapped against the steel of Gimli’s cuirass.

            “We must find cover!” Aragorn called urgently. Legolas nodded and sprinted up to the next gryke. Fire leapt up at him but he overleapt it and shot two arrows down into the chasm even as he dropped from sight.

            Aragorn and Gimli plunged after him. This gryke was deeper than the last, hiding them from view, but all through it echoed the thunder of iron-shod feet and the harsh cries of dwarves. Three foes still barred their way, though seemed bewildered and afraid. A fourth lay stricken with Legolas’ arrows. Aragorn slew one with a thrust and Gimli felled the others with grim efficiency. Then the three companions took off running, dodging hither and thither through the winding maze of stone.

**~**

            Four grey shapes hung in the air, high above the borderlands where the flowering scrub of Ithillien gave way the green sea of the Sto Plains. Dark clouds were drifting in from the east, but they could still clearly see a rider on a white horse. The rider wore black and carried before it a little bundle that might have been a passenger, or perhaps two if they were small enough.

            One of the four said, So he escaped the fire.

            So it would appear, one of them replied. And he will escape this sickness too.

            Perhaps, said another. But first he must reach the city.

            The shapes flickered. They did not descend. They simply rearranged reality so that they were closer to the ground. And they became different. Before they had resembled empty robes, but now… Now they had legs. Four strong legs each and long, swishing tails. And sharp, sharp teeth.

            We hunt, one said and they sprang off after the rider.

**~**

            Death heard the howls before he saw them. It was not an animal noise. It was older. If asteroids made a noise as they hurtled through the vacuum of space, dragging oblivion in their wake, it might sound like that.

            A voice from Death’s shoulder said, “SQUEAK.”

            “I KNOW,” said Death. He hugged the bear and the little pig closer to him and urged Binky on. From the corner of one eye socket, he saw a shape sprinting through the tangled scrub. It was a pale, luminous grey and might have been mistaken for a wolf, had it not been eyeless and faintly translucent.

            Ahead of him rose a low hill, topped with scraggly junipers that leaned out over a cliff-like face of sandstone to overhang the trail. Death smiled, although it was hard to tell.

            Using the scythe would have taken both hands. Instead, a longsword with a skull-shaped pommel and a blade made almost entirely of sharpness materialized in Death’s bony grasp. As he passed under the shadow of the cliff, a second grey shape leapt at him from above.

            The sword swept out. There was a hiss and a flash of colorless fire. The grey shape vanished.

            Out onto the plains rode the Reaper Man, three nightmares in wolves’ bodies hard upon his trail.

**~**

            “It’s a dead end!” cried Aragorn, as the gryke they had been following took a sudden turn and the three companions found themselves facing a ten-foot wall of bare, grey rock. They wheeled about, only to find a solid mass of armored dwarves advancing up the gulley towards them.

            “It’s been a pleasure knowing the pair of you,” growled Gimli, hefting his axe.

            “Likewise,” said Legolas softly. He drew his bowstring back to his ear.

            Aragorn only nodded, his face grim.

            The lead dwarf raised his flame-spewing lance. The tiny spark at its tip that would ignite a river of burning, clinging death was reflected in the dark glass of his visor.

            And then, without warning, a tiny red and blue man leapt down from the lip of the gryke with a wild cry of, “Crivens!!!”

**~**


	17. Chapter 17

In the dingy, purple-grey light of early morning, made dingier by the haze of many-colored smokes and smogs that hung over the city, the coppers assembled.

            Vimes surveyed them thoughtfully from the watch house steps, sipping at his mug of sweet, milky tea. There were fifteen watchmen, counting himself, from a variety of ranks and species. All were veteran members of the force and equipped with the Watch’s rather battered best. A few spoke in low voices, but for the most part a grim silence prevailed. Vimes did not fail to notice that Angua, Carrot, and Sally had formed a rough triangle with the rest of the group inscribed within it. He sighed and turned to Constable A.E. Pecimal, who stood beside him.

            “What’s the news from his Lordship, A.E.?”

            “His clerks are still searching for the user of the rune, Mister Vimes, but he says that your raid should proceed as planned.”

            “I thought he would. I just hate walkin’ in blind.” He shook his head. “Right. Time to get a move on. You’ll stay here and look after things, all right?”

            “If you are sure, Mister Vimes.”

            “Sure as suet. You’re the only other one ’round here who knows what’s going on, besides me and Carrot.”

            Vimes did not add, “And I need you to stay alive in case Carrot and I don’t make it back.”

            “Okay, listen up,” he told the assembled watchmen, as A.E. slipped back inside. “We don’t have much time. We don’t know what we’re going up against. Could be rogue alchemists. Could be something much worse. But if they catch wind of us, odds are they’ll scarper. So we move fast, hit ’em hard, arrest anyone still breathin’, and head home. Got it?”

            There were murmurs along the general theme of, “Yes, Commander.”

            “Good. Then let’s…”

            Vimes was interrupted by a disturbance at the gate of the watch house yard. A young man wearing the purple and grey robes patterned with eyes that denoted the priesthood of Blind Io[1], shoved his way past Fred and Nobby and into the crowd of coppers.

            “Sally!” he boomed, as he dodged around Constable Blue-john. “Sally! I just heard! They just told me!”

            He lowered his voice somewhat as he reached the vampire’s side, but he was still clearly audible.

            “I just found out. You’re going off to fight the person behind the Drained. And you didn’t even tell me!”

            He’d seized Corporal Von Humperding’s wrist in his agitation, Vimes noted. The other watchmen were flowing to form a circle around the pair. Coppers like a good show as much as the next nosy bastard. Vimes thrust his way forward until he could see again.

            “…supposed to be a secret,” Sally was saying, soothingly. “Look, Edwin,” she added, placing her other hand on his shoulder so that they stood face to face. “This isn’t about us. It’s my job.”

            The man shook his head. He stood a good eight inches taller than Sally, with broad shoulders and the deep chocolate-brown skin that Vimes associated with Genua or Hwondaland. The contrast between him and the pale, slender vampire was striking.

            “It’s dangerous. Those Drained are unnatural. Anything that could do that… Sally, I don’t want you hurt.”

            Sally smiled at him, managing to look sweet despite the curved fangs. “I’m a vampire, Ed. Dangerous and unnatural is what we do. I’ll just try to be careful, okay?”

            “But you’re still going?”

            “Yes, dear.”

            “Good,” cut in Vimes. “Glad we got that settled. Now if…Edwin…would be so good as to go wait for us in the watch house, we really ought to be going.”

            The young priest nodded and walked dejectedly up the stairs and into the station. Angua watched him go with a slightly worrying intensity. As soon as the door swung shut behind him, she turned to Sally.

            “He’s your boyfriend?”

            “Yes.”

            “How long have you been walking out?”

            “A little over six months.”

            “But… But then…”

            “Then there can’t be anything between me and your precious Captain Carrot, yes. Exactly.” Sally shook her head and stalked off towards the far gate, muttering something that sounded a lot like, “Werewolves…”

            Angua turned to look at Carrot, who was watching her with the deep, soulful gaze of a basset hound awaiting a piece of steak. She stared at him for a long moment.

            “All right you two. We haven’t got all day. Kiss and make up _that is an order!_ ” barked Vimes. “The rest of you, fall in and follow me. We’ve got a crook to catch.”

            Reluctantly, the coppers headed for the street.

            “I’m sorry,” said Angua quietly. She leaned up and kissed Carrot on the mouth. He hugged her close for a long moment, and then they hurried to join the tail end of the rapidly flowing stream of watchmen.

**~**

            Clerk Williams eased his way cautiously over to the edge of the roof and lowered himself down until his feet were resting safely on the windowsill. The shutters were drawn, so he didn’t need to fear being seen from the inside of the apparently abandoned lodging house.

            They were popularly known as the Dark Clerks, but in truth the “grey-green clerks” would have been more accurate. Unlike the assassins, Vetinari’s special agents rarely wore black. It stood out against mere darkness far too well.

            Williams pulled a slender metal dowel from the pocket of his vest and slipped it between the heavy shutters. Noiselessly, he levered up the latch and returned the dowel to its pocket. From another pocket he produced a miniature oilcan. With it, he carefully greased the hinges of the shutters. He stowed the oilcan once more and eased the shutters open. Making slightly less noise than a prowling cat, Williams entered the room.

            He was halfway across the floor, creeping stealthily along, when a hard, white light sprang up on all sides.

            He yelled and covered his eyes. As the after-images began to fade, he saw before him a man, seated in a high-backed chair. His features were hidden by a long grey cloak and he held a staff of polished wood, as white as ivory, in his right hand.

            Williams made to stagger towards the door, but his feet refused to move. The man spoke.

            “Tell your master that his Grace may meet with me at the Tower of Art two hours after sundown. He shall come alone.”

**~**

            Thirty-nine Heron Street was one of those long, low buildings that grew up on the east bank of the river like fungi and had originally been assembly houses for products that nobody bought anymore and even when they had bought them, they hadn’t done it enthusiastically (such as: cat corsetry, double-ended broomsticks, or—in the worst cases—clockwork lice). Many of its long rows of little windows had been smashed by vandals with nothing better to do, giving the place a gap-toothed look. The doors were chained shut.

            “Detritus…” called Vimes, softly. The troll nodded and snapped the chains with two fingers. Vimes activated one of the new alchemical glow sticks and stepped inside. There wasn’t much to see, just some barrels and crates that might have held salt-pork or tinned bread, and a profusion of elderly cobwebs.

            “There’s supposed to be a basement,” whispered Vimes as they spread out, batons drawn.

            “Over here, sir,” called Cheery, keeping her voice low. She knelt down and opened a wide trap door part of the way to demonstrate.

            Vimes nodded, and the coppers descended silently into the deeper gloom. The basement was nearly as large as the space above but it was even more barren, just crumbling mortar and the muddy ooze you always got this close to the Ankh.

            “There’s a gap in the far wall, sir,” Angua reported. “I can smell the draft.”

            “I hear heartbeats,” Sally whispered. “Maybe thirty humans and one that beats very slow, like a reptile.”

            Vimes moved towards the wall and pressed on it lightly. It buckled in. What he’d taken for filth-covered stone was, in reality, filth-covered sackcloth. Behind it, a curving tunnel led down into the bowels of the city.

            Vimes followed it, Carrot and Detritus right behind him, then the others, with the dull red glow of Dorfl’s eyes bringing up the rear. As they descended, Vimes could hear the noise of eating, rough voices, and high, cold laughter. He halted before a moldering set of double doors.

            Everyone knew that what Ankh-Morpork was mostly built on was…Ankh-Morpork. There’d been a city in this fairly squelchy corner of the Disc for thousands of years and, over time, the old buildings settled deeper and deeper into the mire, until they became the foundation stones for new buildings. They mostly collapsed or filled up with mud, but you could still find rooms that were largely untouched, like bubbles in amber.

            They room they now emerged into must once have been a cathedral. The pews had rotted to dust, the walls and ceiling were buckling slightly inward under the weight of the mud, and horrible black mold had grown up over the stained glass, but there was still no mistaking it. Now the room held, mostly, stone. Great, rough-hewn bricks of black stone, shot through with shimmering veins like silver filament: they lined the walls and had been stacked into crude tables and cruder chairs.

            The room also held about thirty men and women of the furs-and-chainmail barbarian raider variety. They carried notched axes and battered swords and had tattoos of predatory animals etched across their leathery skins. Their eyes were dark and hard and cruel.

            But they did not frighten Vimes the way the Pale Woman did. She sat sprawled on a throne of crates and barrels, draped with pelts of some fine white fur, erected where the altar must once have stood.

            She was white as snow, skin like milk and eyes like clear water. Her fine hair floated on the breezeless air, pale as moonlight. She wore a robe of pure white wool that could not conceal the lush curves of her body. White stones shone from her silver rings and from the ivory flowers of her necklace. She regarded her squalid surroundings like a queen visiting the common folk, a derisive smile hovering about her frosty lips.

            “Why Commander,” she purred. Her voice was not loud but it spiraled out to fill the room like a drop of cream clouding a glass of water.

            “I am surprised to see you here, and it takes a great deal to surprise me. I am intrigued.” Her tone was dangerously casual.

            Vimes cleared his throat and held out his battered copper badge like a vampire slayer lofting his holy symbol.

            “I am taking everyone here into custody, to help further our investigations. You have the right to remain silent, and to a lawyer if you can stomach one. If you resist arrest, we will use force against you.”

            _That ought to do it,_ thought Vimes.

            The Pale Woman clicked her tongue, disappointedly.

            “Come, come, Vimes. Arresting me and mine? And for what? For who?” Her colorless eyes found Vimes’ own, staring into him as though he were a mirror. “Oh but of course. You are Vetinari’s dog, are you not? I might even say his…Catalyst. But he has no love for you. I can give you better.”

            She patted the furs beside her, invitingly. “I have need of men like you, Sam Vimes. The city has need of you. Of us. Who will look after it when Vetinari is gone? He has no heirs, no children. He’s not a family man. But you Sam…you are something else again.”

            Her eyes drank him in until they filled his world, until he could see nothing else.

            “Think how far you’ve come,” she purred. “From gutter rat, to guard, to captain, to commander, to knight, to duke. It would be just another short step to _king_.”

            _I could do it,_ Vimes thought wildly. _I’ve got the men. The people fear Vetinari but everyone loves honest old Sam. I know every inch of this city. I could do it. I could…_

“Detritus!” bellowed Vimes, and he threw himself flat on the floor. The big troll didn’t bother to salute but simply lowered his trusty Piecemaker[2] and let fly. There was the musical twang of a dozen steel cables snapping suddenly forward and then the air was filled with lethal, burning splinters as the swarm of crossbow bolts first shattered and then ignited under the sheer stress of acceleration.

            Vimes rolled back upright to find a pitched battle in progress. The odds had started off at around two to one, but the Piecemaker had done a good deal to level the playing field, among other things, and though the raiders might have been doughty warriors in their own right, they had clearly never been trained to combat the racial politics of the modern Watch. Those who avoided having their brains dashed out by Dorfl and the trolls were apt to be kneecapped by Constable Buggy Swires and the dwarfs. Add to that Constable Visit-the-Infidel-with-Explanatory-Pamphlets bellowing with religious fervor, Sergeant Angua biting through a man’s throat, and Captain Carrot’s grim-faced swordsmanship, and the fight was as good as over.

            Vimes piled in anyway and so was one of the first to reach the spot where Corporal Von Humperding was holding the Pale Woman in a headlock. She glared at Vimes as he handcuffed her, her eyes smoldering with cold fire.

            “I would have made your children kings,” she hissed.

            “I know,” said Vimes. “And it’s never wise to threaten a man’s family.”

**~**

 

[1] The king (usually) of the gods of the Disc, and a bit of a traditionalist. Storms and carrion crows, check. Divine mercy, considerably iffier.

[2] The vicious, over-sized crossbow the troll had built from a scavenged siege weapon


	18. The Gathering Storm

“ ’Twas no a bad fight, though I sez it myself,” said Rob Anybody, wiping his claymore on the beard of a fallen dwarf. “You bigjobs ain’t as hopeless as I was afeared.”

            “We what?” asked Aragorn, brow furrowed.

            “Bigjobs. The tall folk, ye ken. We’s the Wee Free Men, so I suppose yous might call us ‘smalljobs’ only nae one does, less’un they fancy a good hidin’.”

            “I see,” said Aragorn, in a tone that suggested he did not. “ And you came to our aid. Why?”

            “Ach, we was just followin’ the geas.”

            “The geese?” asked Legolas. “But we journey west, not south.”

            “No geese, _geas_! ’Tis like a kind o’ a spell kind of thing, ye ken, that tells us there’s this thing we has te do.”

            “Aye,” said Awfully Wee Billy Bigchin. “And it nudges us, ye ken, shows us the wah.”

            “And so you were following this geas and you stumbled across our company, beset by armed foes,” said Aragorn. “Why deliver us?”

            “Ach, weel ye’d haf te be e’en stupider than Daft Wullie here not te see that you’s a hero.”

            “A hero?”

            “Aye. Wit a magical sword an’ all. That’s what I call style. Besides we had’ne had a good fight for more ‘an half an hoor. The lads was getting’ restless.”

            “I see,” Aragorn repeated. He surveyed the dozens of little red-haired, blue-skinned warriors who were even now rifling through the pockets of dead or unconscious dwarves in search of loose change. “And what will you do now?”

            “We’s got te find the Big Wee Hag,” said Daft Wullie cheerfully. “And the gonagall reckons she’s off te Ankh-Morpork.”

            “Daft Wullie,” said Rob, his voice icy. “Ye ken hoo I told ye that this was a vital mission o’ the utmost _seek-err-ess-see_?”

            “Aye Rob,” said Wullie, dutifully.

            “Weel, what ye just did there was no very secretive.”

            “Sorry Rob.”

            “Your pardon,” cut in Legolas, “but did I understand that you seek a witch, one still in her youth?”

            “Aye, we do at that,” said Rob, with a last ireful glare at Wullie. “She’s the hag o’ oor hills and we’re sworn to protect her. The kelda’s seen dark times a-comin’. So we’re lookin’ for oor hag as best we can.”

            “I think your search is near its end,” said Aragorn, and he told them of the three witches they had met upon the hilltop and how they were bound even now for Ankh-Morpork.

            “Will you travel with us?” he concluded.

            “Ach, why not? Us heroing types aught te stick together.”

**~**

            Vimes ascended the long spiral staircase of the Tower of Art with care. He’d left sword and truncheon back at Pseudopolis Yard, but he still wore his official armor and he had secreted a set of brass knuckles in his left sleeve. That was diplomacy for you.

            He stepped out on to the windswept tower top. Below him, the myriad lights of the city glowed and flickered like acrophobic stars. At this height the bustle of commerce was reduced to a gentle hum.

            Two figures stood at the parapet. The first Vimes recognized instantly as Mustrum Ridcully, the Archchancellor of Unseen University. The other was unfamiliar, wrapped in a long grey cloak and leaning on a white staff. Vimes gave a little cough.

            Ridcully turned. “Hello Sam. Good of you to join us.”

            “Hello Mustrum. Nice evening. Who’s your friend?”

            “He won’t say,” said Ridcully, his voice edged with annoyance. He turned to the hooded man.

            “Now that the Commander is here, do you suppose you could tell us what the hell is going on?”

            “Yes,” said Vimes, moving to stand on the stranger’s other side. “I’ve been wondering that for a while now.”

            After a moment, the stranger spoke. His voice was deep and resonant, like the rumble of distant thunder. Vimes could feel it moving through his chest.

            “Commander Vimes, you come to know the nature of the enemy you fought this day. Archchancellor, you come to better understand the phenomenon that threatens to tear your library asunder. I will try to answer your questions, after which I must appeal to each of you for aid.”

            “And what would a renegade magician know about my University?” snapped Ridcully, his moustache bristling with professional indignation.

            At that the stranger reached up to the clasp of his grey cloak and, in a single fluid motion, tossed it aside. Beneath, his raiment was snow white, white as his long beard and wild, windblown hair. His face was old and young, terrible and beautiful to behold. From his eyes and from the head of his carven staff there issued an otherworldly radiance and on his right hand there was a ring, set with a red stone that shone liked naked flame.

            “Do not take me for a conjurer of cheap tricks, Mustrum Ridcully! I am of the White Council, first of my order, which was old when your University was the daydream of a foolish child. I have not come here through flame and death to be doubted by such as you.”

            Ridcully blanched visibly, but did not back away. Vimes could only stare. He’d heard once that white was really a mixture of all colors[1]. Staring at this man, he found he could believe it. Where the Pale Woman had been like winter moonlight, stealing color from her surroundings, the White Wizard blazed like the sun at noon.

            “Who are you?” asked Vimes.

            “You may call me…yes, call me Gandalf.”

**~**

 

            We were making reasonably good time, all things considered, but Ankh-Morpork was still no more than a cluster of lights on the horizon and I could feel my legs beginning to ache again. Fitz’s wolf had the lead, sniffing after the white horse’s trail. Fitz followed a few yards behind him, the Fool never straying far from his side. Burdened with my lute case, I brought up the rear.

            We’d been walking all day, with barely a halt at sundown for supper, and as I said, I was beginning to feel the strain. I couldn’t tell you why I was going to Ankh-Morpork. The Fool was going because he felt responsible for Pooh. Fitz was going because he felt responsible for the Fool. But me…all my responsibilities were back in Imre. I just had a feeling that going along was the right thing to do. Often, the times I’ve achieved my greatest victories have been when I stopped all my thinking and just did what felt right.

            I heard a swish overhead, like the noise you get when you swing a twiggy branch through the air. I looked up.

            There, seated sidesaddle on her broomstick, framed against the velvety backdrop of the night sky, was the young witch from the Eolian.

            It struck me then that she was beautiful, and I wondered how I could have failed to see it before. Perhaps I noticed it now because she was flying. I’ve always found musical women powerfully attractive. I suppose it makes sense that I should find magical women doubly so. She was a year or so younger than me, petite, with liquid brown eyes and a stubborn tilt to her chin. The night wind ruffled her long hair beneath the pointed hat, framing her heart-shaped face with dancing nut-brown tresses, and pressed the folds of her dark cloak and her butterfly-blue dress tight against her figure. She wore a curious silver pendant on a chain about her throat, like a silver horse made all from flowing lines.

            She gave me a smile that was equal parts shyness and wry amusement. “Can I give you a lift?”

            “Certainly, my lady.”

            Getting matters actually arranged took a while longer. At first, I thought it would be simple: three broomsticks, three passengers. But I’d reckoned without the wolf. Fitz flatly refused to leave the animal behind.

            “Well he’s not riding with me,” said the jolly, grandmotherly witch called Nanny Ogg. “I can’t be responsible for what my Greebo might do to the poor creature.”

            “Oh, give him here,” snapped Mistress Weatherwax, impatiently. Nighteyes flattened his ears nervously but stepped over to the stern woman’s side nonetheless. She placed both bony hands on his hairy back and shut her eyes. There was a moment of silence, and then a loud popping sound as air rushed to fill the empty space where the wolf had been.

            In its place sat a large grey squirrel.

            “How?” I breathed in amazement.

            “Just takes a little imagination,” said Mistress Weatherwax severely.

            “But the extra mass! Where do you put it?”

            “Elsewhere,” she said coldly, as though I’d asked a question about an embarrassing relative. “You and Tiffany had best mount up. We’ve a long way to fly tonight and it is not getting any warmer, that is a fact.”

            Fitz and the temporarily diminished Nighteyes rode with Mistress Weatherwax and her white cat, which seemed to be called You. The Fool rode with Nanny Ogg and her grey tomcat. Tiffany and I had no animals at all.

            “Put your arms around my waist,” she instructed as we drifted slowly up off the ground.

            “So I don’t fall off?”

            “That too.”

**~**

            “It is commonly believed that there is one world. I ask you to believe that there are hundreds, even thousands, more perhaps than there are stars in the sky,” said Gandalf.

            “These worlds are, ultimately, made out of stories. Time, space, substance, and energy: these are but the shells, the backdrop of a play or the binding of a book. There are few powers left in any world that can breach a story, break free of its slipstream and enter another.”

            “But there are some?” asked Vimes, just to make sure.

            “Yes,” agreed the wizard. “There are some. And there are things that live outside the stories. Outcasts and ancient evils. Both of you have met such things before.”

            Ridcully nodded. He’d been a younger man then, during the days of the Red Star. He wasn’t Archchancellor back then, not even a member of the senior faculty, but he’d been one of the few brave enough to climb the steps of this very tower when the screaming began. He could still remember the sight of poor Rincewind flailing away at the Thing with hands and feet.

            Vimes nodded too. The old burn on the inside of his wrist still tingled sometimes when he was hurt or angry. The dwarfs had called it the Summoning Dark, vengeance and fear made sentient. He was the first man in eons, they told him, who had escaped it alive.

            “Mighty among these is Morgoth, the greatest Adversary of my order. He was banished from our story, our world, long years ago under the Doom of the Valar. He cannot enter any story, but He watches and hungers and hates.

            “Now He has found some means of binding one story to another, of bringing worlds into collision. My powers reveal at least six distinct strands and more will follow. I cannot fathom His purpose but He is wholly and irrevocably evil.”

            “So the Pale Woman…” said Vimes, who could see wither this was tending.

            “A creature from another story, malicious and powerful. I know little of her kind but I fear that this city will be best served by her destruction, regardless of what befalls in your courts. She is only one of many terrors that have allied themselves with the Adversary. They are gathering their chief strength some leagues nor…I should say, hubwards of the city, in a vale hidden by black sorcery.”

            “Excuse me,” cut in Ridcully. “But I still fail to see what this has got to do with my library.”

            “Within your library, all stories are recorded,” explained Gandalf. “Now the stories are changing, fusing, multiplying. As this happens, powerful energies are released.”

            “And will this energy…err…dissipate?” asked Ridcully, without much hope.

            Gandalf shook his head. “No. The trapped power will continue to grow until this place is torn apart. Unless…”

            “Unless what?” asked Vimes, suspiciously.

            “Somewhere within the depths of the Library, the old stories must still exist. There may be a way to persuade the magic to flow back into those old shapes and undo Morgoth’s binding. But only if we can keep the servants of the Adversary from reaching the Library first.”

            “What’s this _we_ White Wizard?”

            “Any forces the three of us can raise. They must stand firm against an army the likes of which lives nowhere but in nightmare. Can I rely upon your assistance?”

            Ridcully nodded grimly, but Vimes held up a hand. “I’ve got one more question before I throw my somewhat battered hat into the ring.”

            “Ask it.”

            “You go to the two most powerful men in the city, other than Vetinari. Why leave him out?”

            Gandalf looked briefly weary. “I am a stranger here. The Archchancellor is bound by the strictures of our Brotherhood and your own reputation speaks well of you, Vimes. You have both faced darkness and prevailed. But your Patrician is unknown to me. He is clearly dangerous and of sinister repute. But I will go to him, if you say he can be trusted.”

            Vimes nodded. “Is the city in danger?”

            “Yes.”

            “Then you can count on Vetinari.”

**~**

            The inn we stayed in that night was called the King’s Waist and was held by the witches to be a good inn by the standards of the city, which meant that it had clean beds and no one was likely to try to steal your pants while you were still wearing them.

            The restored Nighteyes was lumbering by the hearth and the rest of us sat nursing a round of drinks for a little while after dinner. We talked in generalities, everyone careful not to probe too deeply. I tried, futilely, to steer the conversation towards an explanation of the witches’ magic, but was hindered by the fact that Tiffany’s legs kept brushing against mine under the table. It was very distracting.

            Soon enough, Fitz and the Fool were beginning to nod, as people tend to do after a day’s forced march. Fitz excused himself and went upstairs, Nighteyes padding after him. The Fool rose to do likewise, and then seemed to remember something. He reached into his travel sack and produced a little linen bundle. He handed it to me and I opened it. Inside were the six remaining wooden figurines he’d somehow carved to exactly resemble the Chandrian, along with the shards of the mommet I’d used to attack Cinder. I still didn’t know quite why it had proved such an effective link, since it contained none of the chill man’s blood or hair.

            “Do you have any idea how dangerous keeping these is?” I asked. “They’re what led the Chandrian to you in the first place.”

            “I know,” said the Fool, seriously. “But I think they’ll be looking for us now, whatever we do. You especially. I’d rather you had a weapon.”

            He smiled, almost sadly, and went in search of his bed. I couldn’t deny the wisdom of his words and didn’t much feel like trying. Instead, I stowed the dolls in my pack and got up to seek the peace of my own room.

            As I crossed the taproom, the cut my foot had taken from the little red and blue berserkers gave a powerful twinge, and I stumbled. A half-heartbeat later, Tiffany was at my side, steadying me.

            “Kvothe,” she asked, “What’s wrong?”

            “I took a cut to the heel about a day ago. I guess it didn’t take kindly to all that walking.”

            “You cut your foot? And you haven’t done anything about it?” She clicked her tongue in reproof.

            “I cleaned it,” I protested. “It’s just hard to properly bandage your own heel, let alone stitch it up.”

            Tiffany shook her head. “Come upstairs and I’ll see to it now.”

**~**

            Tiffany swabbed the cut with vinegar (Nanny claimed that rum worked better, but staunchly decline to donate any for the purpose) and tied it up tightly in clean linen.

            “You can sit up now,” said Tiffany, trying to keep a smile out of her voice. Kvothe rolled over so that he lay on his back on her borrowed bed. He looked remarkably comfortable, his boots discarded on the floor, his flame-bright hair fanned out upon her pillow. He smiled at her in a way that made her skin prickle, not unpleasantly.

            “What have you got to grin about?” Tiffany asked.

            “You might say that I’m grinning on expectation,” said Kvothe, flippantly.

            “Expectation of what?” asked Tiffany. Now she could feel the smile spreading across her face, whether she willed it or no. Kvothe sat up fully and leaned towards her. His mouth found hers in a deep, sweet kiss.

            Several thoughts raced across Tiffany’s mind. Her first thought was, “No, no! I should _not_ be doing this!” Her second thought was, “Gods, his mouth is warm.” And her third thoughts were of home.

            Sometimes, during long droughts, wildfires would break out on the downs. But unless they threatened houses, the shepherds usually let them burn. And in the spring you could tell where the fires had passed because there the turf was soft and green and dotted with a thousand wildflowers.

            _I am like the hills,_ Tiffany thought, as Kvothe’s long fingers found the laces of her dress. _I am kissed with fire._

**~**

            Down in the taproom of the King’s Waist, Nanny Ogg sipped at her apple brandy and gave a dark, earthy chuckle.

            “Well Esme, they say you should never throw two virgins in a bed together. They say it’s like putting a green rider on a horse that ain’t been broke, and someone’s liable to get hurt.”

            “Women ain’t horses, Gytha,” said Granny Weatherwax severely.

            “No,” agreed Nanny, and chuckled again. “Though some among us might be a touch mule-headed.”

**~**

            Tiffany awoke some time later, her back feeling strangely cold. She blinked. She lay half-covered by the thick, quilted blanket, wearing nothing but her silver horse. She yawned languidly and rolled over to survey the room.

            Kvothe stood at the open window, peering intently out at the city.

            “What time is it?” asked Tiffany, more to call his attention back to her than because she was seriously interested.

            “It should be near dawn,” said Kvothe pensively.

            “Really? It’s very dark.”

            “I know,” he replied. “There’s a shadow on the world, from horizon to horizon. It’s as though someone had drawn a shroud across the sun. I fear we may not see dawn again.”

            It was an impressive statement, and did not deserve to be followed closely by a voice from the rafters calling down,

            “Ach, who’s the scunner wi’oot his trowsers on?”

**~**

 

[1] Even octarine, the proverbial color of magic.


	19. Chapter Nineteen

            Those who know Bertram well will support me in my assertion that he is not, by habit, one of nature’s early risers. Larks, and possibly snails, may derive pleasure from being able to bask in the primrose radiance of the dawn, but not so B. Wooster. So imagine the shock that would have gone through my circle of intimates had they seen me on that morning! By the best estimate of my silver pocket watch, it was some twenty minutes past seven, yet there I sat in the interior of a handsome cab as it tootled busily along the Ankh-Morpork high streets.

            This singular phenomenon is, however, susceptible of a ready explanation. I had been ordered to. Jeeves had come to me in the grey hours before six o’clock, when I’d supposed the only people stirring to the milkman and the living dead, to say that my presence was requested at the Patrician’s Palace.

            “What Jeeves?” I’d groaned, muzzily.

            “I understand that his Lordship wishes to discuss a matter of national defense with you, sir.”

            “Can’t you tell him to wait a bit?”

            “No, sir. One does not keep the Patrician waiting, sir.”

            “Doesn’t one?”

            “Not if one wishes to avoid the scorpion pit, sir.”

            “Damn.”

            And thus it happened that, well in advance of the hour of eight, the last of the Woosters, accompanied by his manservant, two hobbits, and an honor guard of menacing trolls drew up to the gates of the Patrician’s Palace. The trolls consented to wait with the coach while an officious, efficient, and official sort of clerk led us inside. I noted a number of other coaches outside, including one bearing the arms of House Ramkin, the employers of Jeeves’ infamous Uncle Willikins, and another with the silver octogram that denoted Unseen University.

            “Seems to be a few people here, Jeeves,” I remarked.

            “Yes sir.”

            “I wonder what it’s all about.”

            “I could not say, sir.”

            “Suppose it’s got anything to do with this rummy weather?”

            I probably should have mentioned earlier that while, as I say, Bertram had risen with the lark, the bally sun had declined to follow my example and it was still pretty dark out. Brooding clouds, as they say, covered the sky from horizon to horizon.

            “Very possibly, sir,” said Jeeves.

            “Oh Jeeves,” I added, remembering something I’d meant to ask the fellow earlier.

            “Yes sir?”

            “I saw Captain Carrot again last night, Jeeves.”

            “Indeed sir.”

            “Indeed, Jeeves. It seems that his girl troubles have vanished away like the dew on the whatsit.”

            “I am most gratified to hear it, sir.”

            “I thought you might be. Apparently just as Carrot and a mob of other rozzers were going off to combat the forces of darkness, a priest of Blind Ian, or somebody…”

            “Io, sir.”

            “You what, Jeeves?”

            “Excuse me, sir. I should not have interrupted, but I believe that the god to whom you were referring is known as Blind Io. A deity of some prominence on the Disc, I understand, associated with the domains of storms and foresight.”

            “Oh. I see.” As I’ve said, Jeeves knows everything. “Thank you, Jeeves.”

            “Not at all, sir.”

            “But I’m afraid you’ve made me lose my place.”

            “The shiriffs were going somewhere and this priest showed up,” supplied Merry, helpfully.

            “Yes, quite. So this priest showed up, just as the coppers were about to go tearing off, and he starts positively berating Sally about sneaking off without telling him. Carrot said he seemed rather steamed up about it.”

            “So I would be disposed to imagine, sir.”

            “Anyway, it turns out that this priest and that vampire have been walking the lovers’ lanes together for quite some time now, and so Carrot’s good name was cleared. He and Miss Von Ubërwald were back together within moments.”

            “I am glad that events concluded so satisfactorily, sir,” said Jeeves, with the faint muscular spams abaft the lip that this wonder-man uses in place of the common smile.

            “Tush, Jeeves. You are too modest. Satisfactorily, forsooth! You have pulled off nothing short of a miracle.”

            “It is kind of you to say so, sir.”

            “But how did you know about this hand-holding priest?” I asked. “That is what puzzles me.”

            “It is an odd coincidence, sir,” said Jeeves, “But it just so happens that I have a cousin in Ubërwald who is married to the Von Humperding family’s Igor. She writes to me with some regularity and in one of her letters she happened to mention that there was much talk in the servants’ hall and above-stairs when the household learned that his Grace’s youngest daughter was ‘stepping out’ with the priest of a major god.”

            “I see, Jeeves. And old mum and pop vampire weren’t any too chuffed I take it?”

            “No sir. Vampires are notoriously allergic to divine energies. But I imagine that this may in fact constitute a large part of the young man’s allure.”

            “You mean young Sally wants to live dangerously?”

            “Just so, sir.”

            At this point, our guide, who had been leading us assiduously up stairs and down corridors, informed us that we had arrived. He showed us through a set of double doors and into a large room, mostly taken up with a long table, around which sat the strangest assortment of people I’d ever seen in my puff.

**~**

 

            Pooh blinked and tried to sit up, but his arms felt too heavy. The air around him smelled of soap and licorice and cough syrup, and there was a white light that stung his eyes.

            “Lie still now,” said a deep voice. Pooh did not recognize it, but its sound was reassuring. He shut his eyes and sank back, realizing as he did that he was lying on a bed.

            “Where am I?” asked the bear.

            “You are in the Lady Sybil Free Hospital in Ankh-Morpork,” said the man.

            “Oh,” said Pooh. Then after a while, “How did I get here?”

            “You were carried here by Death, whose steed knows but one equal. Even so, you had almost succumbed to the corruption of your wound. I have tended you through the long night with every grace I know.”

            For want of any better ideas, Pooh said, “Oh,” again.

            Then he opened his eyes a second time. The light did not seem so bright now and Pooh could see that it came from silver lamps that hung on the white washed walls. The room had one door and one window that showed a view of a darkened city. There was a little table by the side of his bed, on which stood a glass of water. One the bed’s other side was a high-backed chair, and in this chair sat the man with the deep voice.

            He was tall, with long white hair and a snowy waterfall of a beard. He wore a white robe and a mantle clasped with silver, and there was a kindly light in his blue eyes.

            “Who are you?” asked Pooh.

            “I am called Gandalf,” said the man. “And what is your name, little child of the forest?”

            “My name is Winnie-the-Pooh. Or Edward Bear. But mostly just Pooh.”

            The man nodded, as if to have two names was not so very unusual, and said, “Your friend Piglet has been waiting for you to awaken. I only sent him away a few hours ago to get some rest.”

            “That’s good,” said Pooh, smiling. “I should like to see him again. But please, Mr. Gandalf, what time is it? It looks very dark.”

            “It is dark,” agreed Gandalf. “But it is not the darkness of night. A shadow hangs over all the world.”

            “Will it pass?”

            “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Much depends upon you, Edward Bear.”

            “Upon me?”

            “Yes. I wish it were not so, but the woes of the world fall heavy on the innocent. If you are strong enough, we should go. Certain people are gathering at the Palace.”

            “Will there be breakfast?” asked Pooh, hopefully.

            “Yes,” said Gandalf, with a smile. “There will be breakfast.”

**~**

            In the alleyway behind the King’s Waist, in the shelter afforded by a heap of half-smashed crates and barrels, the Nac Mac Feegle held a council of war, except that it was about something that isn’t precisely the same thing.

            “It’s a poor lookout for us, lads,” said Big Yan mournfully as he turned the spit on which an unlucky pigeon was roasting over a fire of matchsticks. “I dinnae ken what she see’s in the scunner.”

            “He’s got good hair,” offered Daft Wullie. The Feegles, who all had hair like oranges gone nova, considered this and nodded in general agreement.

            “Aye but he’s tae skinny,” objected Not Totally Sane Georgie. “A Kelda’s man ought te have a wee bitty more mutton on 'im, if ya tak my meanin’.”

            “He’s a bard, Georgie,” said Wee Billy Bigchin, in his most reasonable tones. “That’s like a gonnagal for bigjobs. No every man has te be burstin’ wi’ muscles, ye ken.”

            “But a gonnagal can’nae go getting’ married!” objected Big Yan.

            “Oh can he no?” said Billy sharply. “The songs say it has happened afore and many o’ them became right famous heroes.”

            “Crivens, keep yer kilt on,” said Big Yan, throwing up his hands in defense. “I meant nay harm.”

            “He meddles in dark powers,” put in Slightly Mad Angus. “We can’nae have a scunner like that romancin’ oor Big Wee Hag.”

            “Ach weel,” said Daft Wullie, placatingly, “It’s nae as though the Nac Mac Feegles ne’er did a wee bit o’ meddlin’ ourselves. And they do say he saved a bear and a pig. Ye can’nae tell me that’s the sort o’ thing dark wizards usually do.”

            “Aye, but,” said Big Yan, searching for another objection. “He’s a total sceemie. Ye all saw how he cut an’ ran when we had him in the forest.”

            “That just show’s he’s a canny one,” said Wullie, doggedly. “Anyone who’d fight a mob o’ feegles would be tae stupid for oor Big Wee Hag, am I right?”

            There was another murmur of agreement from the assembled pictsies.

            “What about that sword?” said Big Yan. “That was no a canny blade.”

            “He does’nae have it wi’ him noo,” reposted Wullie. “Besides, Horace likes him.”

            “Yoos scunners are gonna listen tae a cheese?!” exclaimed Big Yan. “I say again, we should off this sceemie before he steals awhah oor hag.”

            At this, Rob Anybody, who had been listening silently from atop a dilapidated chest of drawers, sprang down into the circle of firelight.

            “Shame on yoos muddlins!” he cried. “Shame on ye and the Kelda who birth’d ye! ’Tis no up tae the Nac Mac Feegle tae decide who the Big Wee Hag romances. Is she a ship, or he a ram? Nae!”

            He glared at his brothers, fire in his eyes. “Noo I dinnae want tae hear another word o’ this. We’ve still a geas on oor heads. The sky’s gone dark above us. And all ye scunners can talk aboot is the color o’ some poor lad’s hair.”

            “But Rob…” began Big Yan.

            “Nae more arguin’!” snarled Rob Anybody. “Any man who crosses me on this, that man is lookin’ at a broken rib.”

            Big Yan stood a full pictsie head taller that his brother, but even he was not fool enough to meet Rob Anybody’s eyes.

            “Right,” said Rob, calming down a little, “Let’s offskie.”

**~**


	20. Chapter XX

_It is my personal experience that no conflict of arms, great or small, is ever won without a great deal of speaking. First, both parties must give speeches until their people are convinced that their cause is just. At each battle, the generals must give more speeches to convince the men to face the foe. As the war ends, both sides must speak at length with each other to decide who has lost what. And at the finish, the priests must give their speeches too, while the families of the slain stand by the soldiers’ graves. Every war is made of words and every word no more than wind._

            _-_ From the writings of King Temerity

 

            I had attended war councils before this, some openly as my father’s son, others clandestinely as Chade’s apprentice, but never before or since have I seen such a strange assemblage as met in the Oblong Office that day.

            At one end of the long table sat the master of the city, Lord Vetinari, menacing and elegant in his black silks. At his elbow stood his Lordship’s chief clerk, Drumknott. At the table’s other end sat Gandalf the White, as radiant as the sun upon the snow. Behind him in the shadows, for he would take no chair, paced Death, black robed and deeply cowled. His skeletal heels clicked ominously against the floorboards.

            For the City Watch had come His Grace, Commander Sir Samuel Vimes the Duke of Ankh, and his strong right hand, Captain Carrot Ironfounderson. Other city leaders had come also, including the elderly Lord Rust, Lord Downey of the Assassins’ Guild, Doctor Whiteface of the Fools’, Postmaster Moist Von Lipwig, and countless others.

            From the University came the Senior Faculty, led by Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully. Across from the Archchancellor sat his brother, the High Priest of Blind Io, flanked by the leaders of the city’s other major churches. I couldn’t help but notice that one of the wizards also happened to be an orangutan, like the ones Nighteyes and I had seen during our wanderings in the Rain Wilds.

            I sat between the Fool, who was speaking earnestly to Doctor Whiteface, and young Kvothe who was making eyes at the youngest of the three witches, who sat across from us, surrounded by the same horde of little blue and red devils that had nearly murdered Kvothe back in the forest.

            Beside the witches and on Gandalf’s immediate left sat the Lord Aragorn, captain of the Dunedain, a company of grim warriors from the north who had arrived overnight without warning. He was flanked by Prince Legolas of Mirkwood and by Gimli son of Gloin of the Lonely Mountain. On Gandalf’s other side sat the little bear and pig who had been traveling with the Fool, and beside them sat Merriadock Brandybuck and Peregrine Took, hobbits of the Shire. Next to the hobbits, who were no taller than children, sat Lord Bertam of Wooster and his manservant, Jeeves.

            Perhaps needless to say, introductions took some time.

            When the tedious exchange of names and titles was complete, Gandalf rose and addressed the room.

            “The Lord Patrician has graciously allowed me this chance to speak to all of you. I pray you, listen well, for what I have to say is true and once I have spoken the fates of more worlds than these will be weighed in your hands and hearts.”

            His deep voice filled the room. I could feel it moving in my chest, like the echo of a lion’s roar. Not that he was loud, by any means, but his words carried a weight and force beyond their sound.

            “Today the sun did not rise. This alone should give the truth to my warning: dark powers are at work. The Adversary of my Order moves against all things that are.”

            “Who is this Adversary?” interrupted Lord Rust, with the complete disregard for tact that I have only seen in small children and great nobles. “What does he want with us?”

            “He is Sauron,” growled Gimli, “And what he wants is dominion.”

            But Gandalf shook his head. “Nay, Gimli, Gloin’s son. I do not speak now of Sauron, but of his master of old: Melkor.”

            At this name, a chill shudder ran through the hall. Folk started or cried out in a nameless fear, and the torches on the wall leapt up with a high blue flame.

            “Some names are perilous to speak aloud Mithrandír,” cautioned Legolas, as the dust settled. “You would do better to speak of him as my people do. Morgoth, we name him, ‘the Black Enemy’.”

            “Very well,” said Gandalf. “Morgoth. Morgoth, and not Sauron. The Adversary, and not the Enemy. Where Sauron desires mastery, his master seeks ruin for ruin’s sake, destruction and not dominion.”

            “The destruction of what?” inquired the Fool.

            “All worlds. Yes, there are more worlds than one, more in fact than there are stars in the sky or grains in a field of wheat. Each tells a story, and each story makes a world. The two are inseparable.

            “Now Morgoth, who was banished from all worlds and all stories by the Powers that wrought my Order, has contrived a means of binding a world to its neighbors, drawing them together until their stories bleed together. Where we now sit is not one world, but an amalgam of worlds.”

            “Excuse me…” said the young witch, Tiffany, who had been listening with a slight frown. “But why would this Morgoth want to bind worlds together? I mean, it might cause some inconveniences I suppose, but it doesn’t seem all that diabolical.”

            “I cannot say,” said the white wizard, sorrowfully. “My vision grows clouded as the threads of my own story fray and even the wise cannot see all ends.”

            Vetinari, who had been listening impassively, gave a slight cough.

            “Why, the matter seems almost childishly simple to me. Have you ever heard the tale of King Agrocleus of Tsort?”

            “Wasn’t he the mad bugger who poisoned all his captains?” asked Commander Vimes.

            “At the harvest feast, yes,” agreed Vetinari. “And can anyone here tell me why it had to be at the feast? Why not, for example, send each man a cask of poisoned wine at his own home?”

            The room was silent. Then a voice said,

            “Too many variables. Too many chances for something to go awry, even if the king had planned well. A servant might sample the wine or perhaps it would arrive late and by then the man might have heard rumors about the other poisoned captains. And if even one captain survives, then you have made a dangerous enemy. But if all the men are in one room, off their own ground and under your eye, then the risk is minimal. That’s what I’d, well anyway…”

            The voice trailed off as I realized, with some dismay, that it was my own.

            “Precisely,” said Lord Vetinari, favoring me with a thin smile that reminded me disturbingly of Chade.

            “But what kind of poison could kill a whole world?” protested Lord Downey.

            “Possibly an anti-world, your Lordship,” put in the skinny wizard who’d been introduced as Ponder Stibbons. “Some of my department’s findings indicate the possibility of entire universes constructed from what is termed ‘anti-matter’: thousands of un-planets orbiting stars that emit dark light. If this Morgoth could truly bind such a universe to our own…”

            Ponder broke off with a shudder and Gandalf rapped his heavy ring, set with a red stone, against the table, calling the room to order.

            “The means matter little. With Morgoth, the end is always oblivion. We have but one chance to thwart Him. We must unbind the worlds, separate the stories from one another.”

            “How?” asked Lord Wooster, getting to the bottom of the issue.

            “The Library,” said Archchancellor Ridcully. “We’re pretty sure that the old stories are still somewhere inside, despite all this mucking around. The trouble is that the new stories are there too, more every minute. And they give off a hell of a lot of magic.”

            “Ook,” said the orangutan, mournfully.

            “Can anyone get in?” asked Mistress Weatherwax.

            “Not if they want to live,” said Ridcully. “Not even you, Esme. Sorry.”

            “THERE ARE SOME,” said Death, from the shadows.

            “Who?” asked the Fool, though he sounded as if he though he knew.

            “Me, I think,” said the bear who sat on Gandalf’s right. “And Piglet too, of course.”

            Gandalf nodded. “True innocents. Their like is grown rare. Yet while their hope lasts they can bear magical powers that would rend baser folk asunder.”

            (Pooh smiled, pleased to be called a Bear of Magical Powers.)

            “You can't m-mean t-to send them in there!” protested Ponder Stibbons. “The thaumic radiation levels…”

            “…ARE OF LITTLE CONSEQUENCE. THIS IS THE FATE OF THE MULTIVERSE WE SPEAK OF, WIZARD,” said Death.

            “We have no choice,” agreed Gandalf. His voice was iron. “It must be done, and it must be soon. The Adversary knows the Library is our one hope and all his His mind is bent upon it. He will know at once when Pooh and Piglet cross its threshold, and He will send all the forces of evil He has rallied against us in hope of destroying it. We must prepare the city for battle.”


	21. Which Tells of the Battle of Ankh-Morpork

            Gandalf led the way to the great Library, Pooh and Piglet following at his heels. It lay at the heart of Unseen University, whose crumbling walls were now manned by some three hundred golems of ancient make, under the command of the city’s Postmaster General. Their strength was tied to the city, so it had been decided that they would remain as a last line of defense, lest the armies that Gandalf and Vetinari had assembled should be overcome in the field.

            Around the Library there hung a veil like molten glass that rippled and trembled with the energy of the magics it strove to contain. Within, the hazy outlines of a large building could be seen, shimmering through a storm of many-colored smokes.

            “There it lies,” said Gandalf to his small companions. “I will open a way for you. Go as swiftly as you may, but be careful. Even before the collision of the worlds, the Library was often perilous. What you seek will be near to the center. You will know it when you see it.”

            Pooh nodded, silently, and took hold of Piglet’s paw.

            Then Gandalf raised up the white staff, which blazed like adamant beneath the black sky, and before their eyes a doorway bloomed forth in the burning veil. Pooh ran forward, as fast as his legs would go, and within the space of a heartbeat, he and Piglet were both lost to sight

**~**

            Vimes felt the earth tremble. The sky was already dark overhead but away towards the Hub yet darker clouds sprang up. Vimes didn’t know whether it was a storm of magic or the dust of an army on the move, but as he watched, it thickened and began to flow rimwards, towards the city.

            “It’s started,” said Vimes softly to Carrot, who stood beside him, his face grim. More loudly, he cried, “Form up!” because it sounded better than, “Everybody, get ready to die!”

            The command spread through the ranks like ripples on a pond, and all around them men and dwarfs and trolls began to stir.

            The commanders had agreed that it did not make sense to meet the foe on the city walls. It had been generations since Ankh-Morpork had needed to repel invaders[1] and by now the walls were so riddled with chinks, secret doors, and rickety staircases that a sensible army would have considered siege weapons to be a waste of time. And once the foe was inside… Vimes had hunted criminals through the labyrinthine alleyways and sewers of the city and he knew how many ways there were to approach any given point within it. No army could block them all and it wouldn’t take very many attackers, the wizards said, to destroy something as unstable as the arcane furnace of the Library.

            So, though it irked Vimes to abandon his cobbled and soot-stained home ground, the armies had instead assembled themselves a little way hubwards of the city. Here the Hubwards Road passed between two stony bluffs. Away to the left these bluffs rose into sheer hills, like the foothills of some mountain that had excused itself to go have a discrete avalanche in the washroom. To the right, the river Ankh could dimly be seen to gleam between the trunks of an ambitious swath of woodland.

            The main body of their force, a mixed bag of watchman, specials, and regimentals under Vimes’ command was charged with holding the pass. The tree line was manned by the Lord Aragorn and his loyal Dunedain, a grim company of rangers who’d entered the city a few hours before dawn. The hills held Lord Wooster and his horde of trolls. These two ‘wings’ would prevent enemies from escaping around Vimes’ blockade and would, if all went well, be able to close upon the foe like a pair of pincers.

            Behind Vimes’ position and to its immediate left, the wizards had entrenched themselves. Surrounded by powerful octograms, mystic runes, bubbling alembics, and a well-stocked salad bar, they were prepared to unleash hell on any enemies who a) flew, b) had magic of their own, or c) got on Ridcully’s nerves.

            Opposite them, the city’s various priests, in conjunction with the witches and Doctor Lorne, had erected a giant first aid tent, well shielded by a rocky outcrop.

            “We can do this, can’t we sir?” Carrot asked, softly enough that only Vimes could hear. “I mean, I know there’s terrible things coming, but we’ve got Death on our side, and Gandalf. I mean to say…” He trailed off, looking at Vimes hopefully.

            “Ye gods lad, you make me feel old,” said Vimes with a dry chuckle. “I’ve only the foggiest notion of the kinda things we’re gonna be fighting. But judging by what Gandalf said, I reckon we have about as much hope of getting through this alive as Nobby has of winning a beauty a pageant. But we’re gonna face it anyway and we’re gonna fight like only coppers in a corner know how. And who knows…we might make it. It might turn out that the beauty pageant’s run by goblins.”

            Carrot nodded. “It’s just, well, you know I just made up with Angua, sir, and, well, what with one thing and another, I’d rather not die just now, sir.”

            Vimes, who was in many ways quite dense but had spent most of his adult life managing men who had difficulty expressing their emotions, said, “Carrot, do you mean you’re getting married?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “What about Angua’s family?”

            “Frankly, sir, if they don’t like it, they can go to hell.”

            Vimes slapped Carrot on the back and laughed. “That’s the spirit. Don’t give up yet, Captain. Where there’s life, there’s hope, eh?”

            Carrot saluted and dashed off to take command of his squadron. Vimes watched him go. Then he sighed and thumbed a bolt into his crossbow, trying to ignore the sudden hot prickling behind his eyes. Sometimes life could be so unfair.

**~**

            There was a noise like thunder, growing louder every instant. Above us, the sky boiled with dust and crackled with lightning in eerie colors. Around me, the Dunedain took up their longbows and set arrows to strings. They were a fierce company, taller than the men of Buck Duchy and leanly muscled, like wolfhounds. Their shaggy horses were much the same. The rangers wore cloaks of grey and green over mail-stitched leather and carried swords and long knives that had seen hard use.

            My own weapons had all been ruined in the fight at the greystone, save for Verity’s sword, which must have been protected by its heavy wrappings. But after the council of war, the Lord Patrician had ordered the Palace Guard to seize the merchandise of several bowyers and armorers within the city. At my belt hung a dwarf-made axe of folded steel and I carried a Burleigh and Stronginearm No. 5 Recurved, a bow that made the poacher’s weapon I’d carried in Buck look like kindling wood.

            I quietly knocked an arrow and moved into the shadow of a spreading elm.

            _“Did you see that guardswoman, Brother?”_ asked Nighteyes, as he came padding nonchalantly over to stand at my side. _“The one with the hair like flax? She smells interesting.”_

“I’m pretty sure she’s spoken for, Nighteyes,” I whispered. I glanced over to where the Lord Aragorn stood with Prince Legolas. Both had their own bows out and were eyeing the field before us closely.

            As we watched, dark shapes, running hard, burst into the valley. Some ran like men and some like wolves and others scuttled like overgrown spiders.

            “Let fly!” cried Aragorn in a carrying voice, that reminded me somehow of Verity. My recurve bow hummed in unison with the bows of the Dunedain and a flight of arrows went winging out across the battlefield. Inhuman screams rent the air and some of our attackers fell, stricken.

            There was a roar and a rumble from the hills opposite us and a great barrage of boulders came crashing down from where Lord Wooster’s trolls held vigil. As if in answer, Commander Vimes’ crossbowmen let loose a volley of bolts. More of our foes dropped, crushed or shot.

            The battle was begun.

**~**

            “I say, Jeeves. This is rather a mess, wot?”

            “Yes sir.”

            We surveyed the little valley, which was now a veritable sea of enemies. I saw orcs of several kinds, some other trolls, werewolves, the walking dead, hairy men with spears, giant spiders, dwarves in black armor, things with spines and tentacles, and a number of what looked to be a particularly disagreeable variety of elephant. In short, a bad lot, whose sole virtue was that it did not contain my Aunt Agatha.

            Rockglass and his lads, who—if I forgot to mention it earlier—seemed to regard myself and Jeeves as sort of messiahs thanks to the efficacy of Jeeves’ hangover cure, were throwing as many boulders as they could lay hands on. They were doing a fair bit of damage, but the supply of boulders was beginning to dwindle.

            “Looks like we had better get down there, Jeeves.”

            “Indeed sir. I notice that Lord Aragon’s archers are also flagging, sir.”

            “Running short on arrows, do you fancy?”

            “So I would be disposed to imagine, sir.”

            “Very well, Jeeves. I can’t say I’m particularly looking forward to this melee. Seems a bit thick, springing something like this on an innocent tourist.”

            “Undoubtedly true, sir. Yet, cometh the hour…”

            “…cometh the man. Quite right, Jeeves. Fetch my mettlesome charger.”

            It had been some years since I’d last put seat to saddle, but no nephew of so zealous a daughter of the Quorn and Pytchley as my Aunt Dahlia lightly forgets the equestrian skills of his youth. Accordingly, when Jeeves brought up the fine bay gelding lent to me by Lord Rust, I mounted with lithesome grace. I was decked out in a rather fetching grey cavalry uniform and sturdy breastplate that Jeeves had rustled up, and wore on one hip a light-ish sort of sabre and on the other my trusty GreensweepsTM putter. Over my shoulder was slung the heavier of the two fowling pieces, well-loaded with swan shot.

            “Chieftain Rockglass,” I called in my best hailing-a-fellow-from-the-other-side-of-the-Drones-smoker voice, “Prepare your trolls for a frontal assault.”

            “What dat?” asked the huge black troll.

            “Get ready to rush at ’em.”

            “Right away, Lord Wooster,” he said, understanding dawning across his craggy face. “Right you coprolites, you heard his Lordship. Fall in an’ get ready to smash heads. Dat’s an order!”

            Jeeves rode up beside me, armed to the gills. In his hands, he carried a long lance topped with a furled banner, which, as his horse came to a halt, he lofted above his head. The wind caught the pennant and snapped it out to flutter in the breeze. The cloth was a deep heliotrope and on it some skillful seamstress had picked out a cow in silver braid. Beneath the leering cudster blazed the legend, “Nusquam Fefellit Amici”.

            “Jeeves…” I said. The words caught in my throat. “Jeeves,” I tried again. “Did you…did you have that made?”

            “Yes sir. I hope it meets with your approval.”

            “It does indeed, Jeeves,” I said, and if my voice trembled, what of it? We Woosters are but human. I turned to face the battlefield once more. The spine was straight, the upper lip stiff.

            “Ready, Jeeves?”

            “Yes sir.”

            “Then tallyho.”

            And down charged the last of the Woosters and his host, like an avenging rockslide.

**~**

            An orc captain, broad of limb and with the burning eye daubed upon his great helm, rushed forward to overleap the barricade of ditches and sharpened wood that stood between him and the fighting men of Vimes’ command. Up stepped Captain Carrot, his bright sword flashing. Sparks flew as he smote the brute through its helm, and it tumbled down in a spray of blood.

            But more came now, swift and thick as a winter storm, and for every one that was spitted on the wooden stakes, there were two who gained the farther side. The Watch fought them—sword, baton, and shield—but inch-by-inch they gave up ground. Then as Detritus, that mighty troll, at last threw down his emptied bow and prepared to die with club in hand, there came a thunder of hooves.

            Down the road galloped two mighty horses, white as the caps of waves, and on their backs, two riders. One was robed in white and in his hand shone Glamdring, the Foe Hammer. The other was robed in black and his hand was the sword of Death, to whom all kings must someday bow. Grim and terrible they were, two gods of doom come down to earth.

            Yet at the sight of them the defenders cried out in joy, and not in fear. “Mithrandir!” they cried, “Mithrandir and Azrael! Courage, for no cause is yet lost when such as these yet fight!”

            And forth they surged like the tide, pouring through the shattered barricade, choked now with the fallen, forth onto the field of war, a wall of shields and swords and valiant hearts.

**~**

            One of the priests of Blind Io had set up what he called an ‘ominscope’ and what Old Cob would call a magic mirror. I have no idea how it worked but it gave us a clear image of the battlefield as we worked to save the lives of the wounded.

            The priests prayed, as is their wont, but they also seemed to know at least as much as any Re’lar in the Medica, parishioners generally being willing to wait a long time for salvation but preferring medicine to happen quickly and reliably. Tiffany and the two older witches were here as well, wielding clean linen, strange herbs, and strong spirits with businesslike efficiency. Tiffany’s competence impressed me, as did the fact that she managed to look radiantly lovely even bloody to the elbows and caught in the act of uncorking a bottle of placebo root with her teeth. I forced my mind a little deeper into Heart of Stone. It wouldn’t do to become distracted.

            For my part, I was working alongside a clan of peculiar men who all seemed to be named Igor. They wore black work clothes with fitted hoods and they bulged oddly. Each had at least one line of stitches across his face. I even counted one with eight fingers on his right hand. They spoke with thick lisps, but sewed faster than the eye could follow, with stitches so small and neat that Master Arwel would have wept to see them.

            I did my limited best, setting bones, cleaning wounds, and holding knots when asked. Whenever I could, I’d steal a glance at the omniscope.

            Lord Aragorn’s Dunedain had finally forsaken the shelter of the trees and were pressing the foe hard from the eastern flank. I could just make out the shapes of Fitz and his wolf fighting alongside them, in such a frenzy that they might have been one creature with two bodies.

            A band of dark sorcerers had drawn a pentacle in the dust of the road and were trading volleys of octarine fire with the wizards on the hill. Death’s white horse was hemmed in by grey shapes that flickered from form to form: now scorpions, now wolves, now giant lizards, now empty robes. No matter how many he felled with his scythe, more always seemed to shimmer into being. Lord Wooster’s trolls seemed unstoppable and with Gandalf’s aid, Vimes’ men looked to be holding firm. But I could see trouble looming.

            I had read about elephants in the bestiaries in Tomes. Some historians wrote them off as fancy, no more real than griffins or ogres, but most agreed that they were real animals from lands far to the north and east of the Stormwall Mountains. But if the beasts now thundering towards Commander Vimes’ lines were elephants, the naturalists hadn’t come close to doing them justice.

            I turned to find Mistress Weatherwax regarding the omniscope with a frown. She too had noticed the beasts.

            “They’ll tear through those watchmen like a man cutting wheat,” I said, urgently.

            “Could be,” said Mistress Weatherwax, her voice impassive.

            “Can’t you do something?”

            She titled her head to one side, like a bird thinking. Then she seemed to reach a decision.

            “Yes.”

            With startling suddenness, she sank to the floor of the tent and lay down. Then she went very still. Her eyes unfocused and her breathing slowed, and then ceased. I was about to start panicking when I saw her claw-like hand slowly reach into her pocket and bring out a paper card. It read, “I ATE’NT DEAD”.

            I blinked. It wasn’t the sort of statement you could argue with.

            “It’s all right,” said Tiffany, softly. She had come up behind me while I stood transfixed. “She’s going Borrowing.”

            “She’s what?”

            “Putting her mind outside her body.”

            I looked at her incredulously. Between Abenthy and Elxa Dal, I’d heard of and attempted more strenuous mental exercises than I could have remembered before undergoing those exercises. But to put the mind _outside_ the body?

            “What for?” I asked.

            “To enter another one,” said Tiffany. “Look.”

            She pointed to the ominscope. I followed the gesture and saw that one of the great grey earth-shakers had broken stride.

            It let out a bellow that I could hear even from within the tent and shook itself, throwing off the swarthy soldiers who clung to its back. Then it wheeled about to face the beast nearest to it, lowered its tusked head, and charged.

            They collided like…I cannot say. There are times when words fail. Someday perhaps, I will write a song that moves with the majesty and fury of those battling creatures and then you will understand the awe and terror of that sight.

            I fled the tent, though whether to avoid looking at the spectacle any longer or in hopes of seeing it more clearly with my naked eyes, I could not say. Tiffany followed me and for a moment we stood blinking in the glare of the colored light that streamed from the wizards’ workspace.

            “Boy!” called a voice, away to my right and well behind me. “Over here.”

            Even as I turned, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck begin to rise. There, well inside all our cunningly laid defenses, stood the Chandrian. I didn’t pause to wonder how they’d arrived; it was in their nature, like lightning from a blue sky.

            “Take them,” hissed Haliaax, and his voice was the lazy shifting of a basking snake. I snatched for the bag of mommets the Fool had given me, which hung at my belt, but before I could begin to recite a binding, Cinder had crossed the ground between us. He moved in an ivory blur and pressed the tip of his pale sword, not against my throat, but against Tiffany’s.

            He turned and grinned at me, slow and wolfish, his black eyes glistening. It was the smile you saw sometimes on the faces of the veteran whores, who lingered under the lamps of Imre’s brothels, when they spied a fresh-faced student: cruel, sensuous, and suggestive.

            “Gotcha,” purred Cinder.

            “Now, now, Cinder,” chided Haliaax, “We must not…”

            But we were never to learn what it was the Chandrian must not do, for at that instant, a one-eyed grey demon exploded out from behind a boulder and launched itself at Haliaax. Some small, rational part of my brain knew that it must be Mrs. Ogg’s cat, but the savagery with which it attacked the Lord of the Chandrian seemed to transform it into a howling, many-legged whirlwind of claws.

            Cinder’s sword point dropped, his attention distracted. It was only for the barest of instants, but it was enough. I screamed a binding, slamming my Alar down like a hammer, and heaved the bag of wooden dolls into a low brazier that been placed some yards from the tent. The old sackcloth, which I had treated with lard and lamp oil, blazed as it landed on the hot coals, and then leapt up like a bonfire, blue and blinding.

            The Chandrian shrieked as flames like dancing sapphires consumed them. Earlier, I’d taken the time to link all the braziers, torches, and campfires I could find together, before going to work with the Igors. Their combined heat must have been terrific. Unfortunately, so was the slippage. Even as my worst enemies crumbled into fine grey ash, I reeled drunkenly, the second-hand heat filling me like a vicious fever.

            “Those thing must make _insanely_ good links,” I said muzzily, struggling to remain upright. “Even with blood and bile, I couldn’t have moved heat so fast! And so efficiently! I should be cooked alive.

            “I mean, look,” I cried, pointing to where Haliaax had stood. “Just ash! Like Incanis in the story.”

            A fist caught me in the belly and I fell. I heard a meaty thud and the yowl of a cat in pain, and then Cinder was standing over me, fine clothes charred and black eyes murderous.

            “What have you done?!” he screeched, so loud and high that it hurt my very bones.

            _Of course,_ I thought dimly _, I’d used his doll already._

He drew back his sword in a fluid, quicksilver motion, and I knew that I was going to die.

            Then Tiffany laid one hand on his shoulder. Her other hand was flung out towards the tent in a desperate gesture of summoning. Cinder howled. I have heard men scream in fear, in grief, in pain, and as they died. I have heard the screams of the stabbed, the burned, the broken, and the betrayed. But I have never heard another sound like that.

            Cinder fell to the ground, graceless now, twitching like a hooked fish, while Tiffany stood over him, her hand still raised. And I understood. She was moving pain. Not heat. Not force. Not even energy as a sympathist would understand it. The pain of the dying flowed through Tiffany and into Cinder.

            Slowly, I rolled to my knees and drew out my battered clasp knife. To drive it through Cinder’s ebony eye was the hardest thing I have ever done. It felt too much like mercy.

**~**

            Vimes remembers the battle in flashes. Scenes, sounds, and emotions burned in his mind like the purple-green afterimages you got when you stared at a fire too long, leaving only a vague impression of the actual train of events.

            He remembered the sight of Lord Wooster, outlined against the boiling sky, as he gunned a howling banshee from the air. He remembered the hot wind that had swept the field as the black dragon had soared lazily overhead, the wizards’ fireballs splashing its hide with as little effect as raindrops, and the roar it had made as Ridcully sent a single bolt from his trusty crossbow through the only soft patch in the monster’s belly. He remembered the look of anguish on Fitzchivalry’s face as he hewed the throat of the oliphaunt that lay thrashing on the earth, and the words the man had cried as he staggered away, drenched the beast’s spurting blood: “It was singing. I heard it in the Wit. I was singing as it died.”

            He recalled the wild yelping of the orcs’ wargs as Angua had ripped them to bloody shreds to reach the place where Carrot lay, a spear through his hip. He could still smell the carrion reek of the shambling horror, which could only have been the work of wicked Igors, when Gimli had laid its belly open with his axe. The remembered the black things, eyeless spiders with feet like razors, that burst from the earth, cutting down men and horses like locusts scything through a field of wheat. And he remembered the cheer that went up when the Nac Mac Feegle came swarming forward to beat the monsters back.

            He could remember the hiss of Legolas’ arrow, and the answering hiss as vampire dissolved into dust and smoke, the shaft sunk through its heart. He remembered a thing that wore men’s bodies like clothes, leaping from one to another as they died, making no distinction between defender and invader. He had seized the thing as it entered the body of one of the Dunedain, taking hold of the possessed ranger by the throat. The scar on his arm burned like fire and he felt them die—man and monster—beneath his fingers.

            He was tired now, so tired. His limbs ached, his head spun, and his tongue tasted thick and leathery. There were bodies everywhere, some still crying out, and smoke and gore crows and flies.

            Here and there, knots of fighters still struggled, but all semblance of strategy and order had evaporated. Vimes leaned on a broken pike shaft for support, watching idly as a black troll, even larger than Detritus, battered away at a spider the size of a small elephant. He wasn’t sure which of them might be on his side and was, in any case, too tired to care.

            He tried to turn and walk away, but he stumbled. Skinny, no, downright scrawny arms caught him and Vimes recognized the peculiar smell of Corporal Nobby Nobbs.

            “Gotcha, sir,” said Nobby, cheerfully. “It’s almost over now, sir.”

            “Yeah, but who’s winning, Nobby?” said Vimes, as he steadied himself.

            “No one, sir. That’s why they call it ‘war’.”

            Vimes laughed, the helpless laugh of an exhausted man whose brain has decided to retreat to quiet corner of the skull with a nice big bottle of home-brewed antidepressants. By the time he’d recovered himself, they’d been joined by Fred Colon, who despite a long career of surviving battles by looking fat and harmless, must have been doing some actual fighting because he was sporting a nasty cut over his right eye and was carrying a bloody sword.

            Vimes clasped Fred’s forearm, in the traditional manner of soldiers too overwrought to shake hands and too sweaty to hug.

            “Hello Sam,” said the Sergeant, amiably. “If you looked any deader, you’d be Reg Shoe.”

            “That’s a bit rich coming from you Fred,” said Vimes. “I seem to remember the morning after a certain Hogswatch party when Mrs. Colon had to call us at the Yard to nip 'round your place with young Igor and rescue you from a gang of inexperienced taxidermists.”

            The three men chuckled over their mutual recollection of the legendary Great Hangover.

            “We’re getting old, Fred,” said Vimes at last.

            “ ’Fraid so, sir.”

            Vimes sighed. “Come on. Let’s sound the retreat.”

**~**

            And it was in that hour, as the horns sounded to call the defenders’ scattered hosts back to the city walls, that the Enemy sent forth his most terrible servants.

            Down from a darkened sky, like falcons that fall upon the mice of the field, came the nine riders. They were clothed in black and rode upon winged beasts that were dreadful to behold. In every rider’s hand a pale sword flamed.

            The people cried out in fear and fled their coming as though driven by a great wind. Azrael was gone, torn from the field of battle and into some stranger plane by the wicked workings of his ancient foes, but yet there was still one who dared to face the nine.

            Up rode Gandalf, his staff upraised, and from it there issued a brilliant light. White and furious it shone, a winter’s sun at the ending of the world, and the riders were dismayed. Their mounts wheeled and cried in terror, and then broke and fled away to the north.

            Yet even as they fled one foe, they came into the talons of another. For down from the north came Gwaihir the Windlord, king of eagles, and with him many mighty birds, and the riders were set upon.

            But one among the nine was mightier than his fellows. His mastery over his beast was a thing like steel and he drove it on, passing over the brand of Gandalf and away towards the city. Low he swooped, urging his mount through the stony pass, so that the defenders there were blasted with the wind of his passage, and cowered back in fear.

            Yet this pride was his undoing. One man, Aragorn son of Arathorn, Elendíl’s heir, still held his ground. As the fell steed swooped low above him, Anduríl, Flame of the West, flashed and smote it through the breast.

            The beast came crashing down, dust and dark blood leaping up in a storm, and when it passed, Aragron stood face to face with the Witch-King of Angmar, lord of Minas Morgul, and deadliest of the nine.

            The dark lord advanced upon him, sword drawn, his eyeless gaze upon Aragorn’s face.

            “So this is the mighty Elessar, last hope of men,” said the Witch King. His laughter was high and cold. Aragorn spared no breath for words, but lunged forward, Anduríl in his hand.

            Their swords met in a clash of steel. Back and forth they danced, man and wraith and hissing blades.

            “Give up, you fool,” laughed the Witch-King, as he bore down on Aragorn. “No living man can kill me.”

            And it was then that down from the high crags, like an orange, hairy avenging angel, bounded the Librarian.

            He struck the Witch-King across his hooded face, a backhanded blow that brought the wraith to his knees. Then he seized his head with both long-fingered hands and twisted as only an ape can twist. There was a rending sound, and the Witch-King toppled back, light and smoke pouring from his broken body.

            Aragorn seized the Librarian and drew him back, as the light grew brighter and the smoke began to boil. Down into the vale they fled, as a howling maelstrom tore through the pass, hurling boulders and crackling with a hellish glow.

            Gandalf met them at the foot of the bluff, riding hard.

            “The wind,” Aragorn yelled to him. “Where is the wind coming from?”

            “Where do shadows come from?” replied the wizard. “Behold!”

            He pointed to the vortex that now burned where the nazgúl had fallen. In its center they could dimly see a great shape, bloated and hideous. Eight long tentacles grasped the air, each puckered with a thousand fanged maws. Its hide oozed with thick venom and bristled with a forest of barbed spines. At its center there pulsed a lidless yellow eye, wreathed in octarine flame.

            “What is it?” cried Aragorn.

            “Our Adversary’s last weapon,” replied Gandalf. “Go! Swords are of no more use here. He has summoned the Sender of Eight!”

            And so saying, the wizard galloped forward, a single comet of silver fire, into the jaws of Bel-Shamroth.

**~**

 

[1] Who were now mostly looked upon as a niche sort of tourist and—therefore—an important source of revenue.


	22. Chapter Twenty-Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Which Pooh and Piglet Face Terrible Danger

            Under the dome it was hot and smoky, but at the same time very bright. There was a sizzling noise and the air smelled taut, like the feeling you get before a thunderstorm.

            Piglet held tightly to Pooh’s paw and they walked forward until Pooh bumped his nose against something solid. Closer inspection revealed it to be the Library door, actually two doors, bound in brass. Over them ran the letters,

            “NVNC ID VIDES, NVNC NE VIDES.”

            “I wonder what they mean,” said Piglet.

            “Probably the same as ‘Sanders’, said Pooh and Piglet agreed that this might be so, since nobody really knew what ‘Sanders’ meant either.

            Piglet stood on Pooh’s shoulders to grasp the doorknob, and after some grunting they pulled the left door just enough ajar to let one bear and one pig into the Library.

            The inside was very dim because the smoke stopped most of the sunlight from coming through the domed glass ceiling. There were long rows of bookshelves leading off in all directions and the sizzling noise had grown louder, becoming a sort of buzzing, like angry bees. It seemed to be coming from the books.

            “Which way do we go, Pooh?” asked Piglet, in a hushed voice.

            “I don’t know,” said Pooh. “Let’s try over that way.”

            “Supposing that’s the wrong way, Pooh?” said Piglet, nervously.

            Pooh thought about this, and then said, “Supposing it isn’t?”

            And so they set off. After they had been walking for some time they came to a place where three aisles met and formed a little clearing in the forest of paper leaves. In its center was a Deep Pit. Pooh and Piglet went over and peered down into it.

            At the bottom there was quite a large jar with its lid halfway off. It was dark in the Pit, but Pooh could see a golden gleam and smell the rich scent of honey. He started to think about how long it had been since he had had any honey, and then he started to lick his chops, and then…

            “Pooh!” cried Piglet.

            “Yes, Piglet?”

            “You were starting to climb down into the Deep Pit!”

            Pooh was on the point of denying this, when he realized that he was seated on the edge of the Pit with one leg actually over the side.

            “Oh,” he said.

            “Come away, Pooh,” said Piglet. “It’s a Cunning Trap.”

            Pooh did so, though his belly grumbled, and they went on.

            After awhile they came to a dead end, but Pooh saw that a little way above them was a balcony with more shelves of books.

            “Piglet,” asked Pooh, “Do you think you might climb up one of those shelves?”

            Piglet looked hard at the shelves around them and said that he didn’t think so.

            “The ledges are too far apart,” he explained. “And I am a Very Small Animal.”

            Pooh nodded seriously. “I might climb them,” he said, “But I should need both paws, so I shouldn’t be able to carry you.”

            “Oh,” said Piglet quietly. He didn’t much like the idea of being Left Behind, but he squared his jaw and said,

            “Alright.”

            “No,” said Pooh. “It isn’t. I can’t go on by myself for I am a Bear of Very Little Brain and shall need your help.”

            Piglet brightened up a bit. Then he thought of something.

            “Pooh,” he asked. “Do you have a piece of string?”

            Pooh did, as a matter of fact, the same piece he’d saved after the party Christopher Robin had held after the Terrible Flood so very long ago. With this string they tied Piglet to Pooh’s waist like a pocket watch and the Bear began carefully to climb.

            Halfway up he accidentally bumped a book with his toe. There was a noise like, “Bzaat!!” and the tome transformed into a little flock of yellow butterflies. This startled Pooh so much that he nearly fell off, but he recovered himself and kept climbing.

            They reached the little balcony without further incident and at the back of it they found a door that opened onto a spiral staircase.

            “Up or down?” asked Piglet.

            Pooh listened for a long moment. Then he said, “Down.”

            “How do you know?” asked Piglet.

            “I can hear them calling,” replied Pooh.

            “Who?” asked Piglet, “Not your honeypots, surely?”

            “No,” said Pooh. “The stories.”

            So down they went. It was even darker here and the aisles were narrower. A thick layer of dust covered everything.

            Some time later, Pooh stopped.

            “Look Piglet, someone has been here before us. We must be on the Right Track.”

            He was pointing at two sets of pawmarks left in the dust that stretched away ahead of them.

            For a moment Piglet grew very excited. Then he stopped, stared hard at the pawmarks, and then carefully measured one against his own paws.

            “No, Pooh,” he said sadly. “These are _our_ pawmarks. We’re going in circles.”

            It took a little while for them to get un-circled, but eventually they managed it. Now they were hurrying along a broad lane between two blocks of aisles and feeling like they must be getting closer every minute, when Pooh tripped over an ink pot, lying abandoned on the floor. The cork popped out with a noise like a bear coming out of a rabbit hole, and a great torrent of ink burst forth. The black flood swept them off their feet, expanding to become a broad river that flowed where the lane had been.

            Sputtering and stained, Pooh dragged himself out of the ink, which was quite deep, and into the shelter of a dusty aisle.

            “Pooh! Help! I can’t swim!”

            Pooh turned to see Piglet stranded in the river’s middle, clinging tightly to the scrap of cork. He showed no signs of drifting closer to the bank, and Pooh doubted if he could stay afloat for long.

            “Hang on, Piglet!” he yelled. “I shall think of something!”

            “What will you think of?” Piglet yelled back.

            At this Pooh’s heart sank, for he did not know what he would think of or even if he would think of anything at all. His mind felt cold and numb.

            Then all of a sudden he remembered the day they’d played Pooh-sticks by the little bridge, and Eeyore had fallen in.

            Pooh hurried to the nearest shelf and grabbed a heavy marble bookend, carved to look like a turtle with four heffalumps on its back. Holding it in both paws, he spun around to build up speed, and threw it as high and far as he was able.

            Up, up, up it soared, over Piglet’s head, and then tumbled with a crash into the dark stream. A great wave flew up, nearly drowning poor Piglet, but shoving him far enough towards Pooh that the Bear was able to grab him and haul him out.

            Both of them were very black and soggy, but given the alternatives, this did not seem as bad as it might have.

            “Thank-you Pooh,” said Piglet.

            “Don’t mention it,” said Pooh graciously.

            They pressed on, the dust clinging even more to their damp fur, and before long they came to a set of stone doors. Eight circles were engraved in the dark rock, each decorated with runes and scrollwork that shed a pale light.

            “There aren’t any handles,” said Piglet as they drew near. “How do we get inside?”

            Pooh laid an experimental paw on the right hand door and it swung open with a low groan. Before them, more stairs spiraled away into the earth.

            There was a sudden noise behind them, like a thunder of running feet. Pooh spun around.

            Towards them hurtled a creature the size of a small house. It had four legs, thick as tree trunks and a great club-like tail. Spines ran down its long back and ‘murder’ was written across its blunt scaly face. So were ‘homicide’, ‘assassination’, ‘manslaughter’, ‘killing’, and ‘execution’. The words flickered across the creatures hide, changing colors as they did.

            Pooh stood transfixed, but Piglet, too terrified to be awestruck, seized him by the paw and dragged him across the threshold. The stone doors swung shut behind them. A moment later there was the dull thud of a heavy body striking a rock wall.

            “W-what was th-that?” gasped Piglet, when he could speak. “Was it a jagular?”

            “No,” said Pooh. “It wasn’t a jagular.”

            “A woozle then?”

            Pooh shook his head. “I think it was a Thesaurus.”

            “I thought,” said Piglet, softly, “I thought that those were books.”

            Pooh shook his head again. “Oh no, Piglet. Books are those papery things on the shelves. That was clearly a Very Fierce Animal, not a book.”

            That wasn’t quite what Piglet had meant, but he was too shaken to argue. The two of them crept down the spiral staircase as quietly as they could manage. As they descended, it grew darker and darker, until the shadows felt thick and silky as cobwebs.

            Then all of a sudden things grew brighter. The light was…odd, a sort of purplish green. It made Pooh’s eyes water.

            Soon the stairs gave way and Pooh and Piglet found themselves in a round, low-ceilinged room. In its center was a pedestal, surrounded by an eight-pointed star drawn on the floor in glowing chalk. At each point of the star burned a black candle. On the pedestal…

            “See Piglet,” said Pooh. “That is a Book.”

            It certainly was. The Book was thicker than a brick and wide as a flagstone. Its cover was of supple, glossy leather and gems shone along its spine. Heavy chains held it shut but beneath them, spidery runes could be seen, stamped in the leather. More of the strange light leaked from between the Book’s pages.

            Pooh walked up to the pedestal. The chains slid back like obedient snakes.

            “Pooh…” said Piglet, nervously, “What are you going to do?”

            “This,” said Pooh. Then he opened the Book. The light flared up like a sunrise, blinding them both.

            When they could see again, the Library basement was gone. Instead, they stood on a green hillside. It rose out of the summer woodland, high enough that Pooh could see the silver sparkle of the dozen little streams that fed the river. Late afternoon sunlight came lancing down between the leafy boughs of the sixty-something trees that covered the hilltop. Between them flitted whirling shapes that might have been sprites or sycamore seeds. This was an enchanted place.

            “Galleons Lap,” said Pooh. Piglet nodded.

            They wandered for a while in the warm, sleepy silence of that magic glade, feeling the pains and fears of the past few days fade away like mist.

            Pooh found a branch lying in the grass, silvered by the weather, and remembered its touch upon his shoulder the day Christopher Robin had knighted him.

            And then, as if thinking of him had made him appear, there was Christopher Robin.

            He lay curled at the base of a great oak, his head pillowed on the smooth green grass, clearly asleep. But his sleep was not a peaceful one, for he twitched and rolled about and cried out softly through his closed lips. And Pooh saw that he’d grown older since that day on top of the forest. He was longer and leaner, like a garden gone to seed, and Pooh wondered if this was really the boy he had known and loved so long and whether he now had any use for Bears.

            But he was a knight, and a knight must be brave, so he walked over and, very gently, took Christopher Robin’s hand in his.

**~**

            It was dark in Christopher Robin’s dream. Pictures slid in and out of focus: battles and marble halls and skies filled with alien stars. But at the center now, one image burned.

            An old man on a white horse was struggling with a dark monster with many legs and a single, yellow eye. And in the curious manner of dreams, Christopher Robin realized that he was the old man, or the old man was him, and he looked into the monster’s eye and it was like a window. And in the dark beyond it he could see Someone.

            The Someone was chained, though he could not see to what, and dark blood oozed from a cut on His heel. His face was paler than the moon and very beautiful, but on His brow there sat an iron crown, where three gem-less sockets gaped, and in His eyes there was only emptiness.

            The monster lashed out again at the old man, and the Someone laughed, a silent, joyless sound. Christopher Robin could feel himself growing weaker. The monster beat at him and his strength was failing.

            Then suddenly, a shape appeared, standing between him and the monster. It might have been a bear, but a winged bear in armor that gave off a silver light. In its eyes shone the light of courage and of loyalty and of wisdom. In its paw there blazed a sword that might have been a branch, but a strong branch that cut away everything that lied and schemed and stole. And from the sword there leapt a golden tongue of flame. It struck the eye of the monster and passed beyond it, filling the darkness with pure light.

            The Someone screamed, and the monster screamed, and Christopher Robin screamed, and it sounded like the ending of the world.

**~**

Pooh saw the boy start, his hand squeezing hard on Pooh’s paw, and his eyelids fluttered open.

            “Pooh…” he said, in a tired whisper. “I’d almost forgotten.”

**~**


	23. The Hours After

_“Between Dusk and Dawn, there are such a variety of miracles that in never ceases to amaze me that a man can find it in himself to sleep. What courage! And what pride.”_

 

 _-_ From Telhos’ Memoirs, Volume VI, Chapter Eight

 

            In the end, we all repaired to the home of Commander Vimes. Whether that gathering was more like a festival or a wake, I have never decided.

            Gandalf sat, bloodied but unbroken, in the center of a great sea of friends and admirers, the hero of the hour. In truth though, there were so many heroes there that night that no one might be overburdened. The old man was smiling affably, laughing at the antics of the hobbits, as the Fool tried to teach them how to cartwheel. Aragorn sat close beside him and with him Legolas. The two of them were watching Nanny Ogg lead Gimli out onto the dance floor, the intensity of their gazes suggesting to me that they had made some sort of a wager.

            At the far end of the room, Bertie Wooster had begun to sing a hunting song, aided and abetted by several of the watchman and wizards, the Librarian taking the bass with a series of rhythmic ‘ooks’.

            In one quiet corner, I saw Angua fussing over Captain Carrot, whose leg was still wrapped in bandages. In another, I saw Jeeves and Vetinari poring over a stone game board, littered with carven dwarves and trolls. Everywhere I could see feegles “singin’ and boozin’ and dancin’ and boozin’, ye ken”. A splintering crash alerted me to the conclusion of Detritus and Rockglass’ arm-wrestling match. On one of many overstuffed couches, I spotted Mustrum Ridcully, with a bravery that I still find appalling in its recklessness, putting a gentle arm around Mistress Weatherwax’s shoulders. To my amazement, she actually smiled and—ever so slightly—leaned against him.

            Even Death seemed to be enjoying himself, explaining beekeeping to Pooh and Piglet as they sat on his bony knees. He’d brought out a heavy jar of a honey as thick and black as night. It made my mouth water just to look at it. Everything was cheerful and bright.

            A wave of sudden loneliness, and a curious sensation of homesickness, washed over me. I put down my drink and rose to go outside. Nighteyes, who had been gnawing a bone by the hearth, rose and followed me.

            The night air was cool, and though no stars were visible, I guessed it to be sometime after midnight.

            “Only a few hours left,” I told Nighteyes. “Gandalf said that things would go back to normal at dawn.”

            Nighteyes ignored this. Wolves don’t really understand small talk.

            _“Brother, something is troubling you,”_ he thought to me.

            “We won,” I said aloud. “We really did it. I feel like I should be beside myself with joy. But I’m not. I’m just tired.”

            _“And lonely,”_ said Nighteyes, nuzzling my hand. _“Not the kind of loneliness I can push back. This kind is in your bones, right in the marrow of you.”_

I nodded. “I want Molly. I know it’s stupid, but Eda and El, I want her.”

            I shuddered, took a few steps down the path, and then retraced them, carried on a restless tide. Nighteyes just watched me.

            “It’s as though none of this…” I said, gesturing to encompass the house, the yard, and the dark sky above, “None of this matters if she is lost to me. And she is. And nothing I’ve done or can do will change that.”

            Nighteyes sighed his whiskery wolf’s sigh. Then he stood up and began to pad away down the path towards the gates that led out of the yard.

            _“Come on,”_ he thought as he nosed them open.

            “Where are you going?”

            _“Buck Duchy,”_ he said, as I trotted after him, away from the feast and into the city.

            “Why?”

            _“We are going to find a porcupine.”_

“What for?”

            _“Because we want what we cannot have. Because quills are sharp, but meat is sweeter. And because a face full of barbs will be easier to bear than more of your whining.”_

**~**

            For a man who’d begun his professional life as a back-alley copper, Sir Samuel Vimes had done pretty well for himself. The spacious manor where he and Lady Sybil lived was surrounded by green lawns on all sides, dotted with ornamental pools, shrubs, and statuary, and fenced in by a high stone wall draped with ivy. However, I freely admit that I was not giving the carefully landscaped grounds the attention they deserved. I sat with my back to a weeping willow, its long boughs trailing in the water of a carp pond, the surface black as polished jet. Tiffany lay curled against me, her head resting in the hollow between my chin and collarbone, one of my hands twined in hers, the other on the curve of her hip. My lute case lay some feet away. I’d played for us earlier and Tiffany had sung with me. She had a sweet voice, like the larks that sang over the downlands.

            Now we lay quietly. I was concentrating on the warmth of her, the softness of her body against mine, and the smell of her: sharp from the herbs she ground, sweet like buttermilk, and intoxicating with a scent that was all her own. I was trying to memorize her, lock her in my mind forever. I did not want to have to say goodbye.

            “My people are wanderers,” I found myself saying. “We meet folk, we say farewell, we move on. We never settle down. It would be unthinkable, really, like cutting off your hand. But I’d have done it for you. I’d leave all roads behind for you.”

            “My people are shepherds,” Tiffany said softly. “We have lived on the same hills, working our flocks, for generations. The hills are in our bones and our bones are in the hills. But I’d have given them up for you. I’d leave the wold behind for you.”

            She turned to me then, her eyes shining. The moment was so very nearly perfect. If only the stars were out…

            Something welled up inside me, joy or sorrow or some compound of the two, and so quietly that even Tiffany, who could feel the beating of my heart, did not hear it, I called the name of the wind.

            Above us, a gust swept away the heavy clouds that had lingered all the day and the stars shone down on us like the lamps of an enchanted city. I leaned forward and kissed Tiffany on the mouth, felt her melt against me, and lost myself for a long time.

**~**

            Sam Vimes closed the book[1] and placed it quietly on the little nightstand beside young Sam’s bed. The boy, nestled snugly beneath a heavy quilt printed with pink and blue rhinoceroses and watched over by a menagerie of stuffed animals, was already fast asleep. Beneath the bed, Dribble, the ancient and toothless dragon, made small ‘nyuck-nyuck’ noises as he slept. Pale moonbeams slid in through the nursery window and played upon the slightly mad eyes of the rocking horse. A warm, comfortable silence pervaded the room. Vimes leaned back in his basket chair and smiled. It had been a busy week, all told.

            The door opened softly and Sybil entered, still in her evening gown. She smiled at the pair of them and shut the door behind her before coming to give Vimes a kiss on the cheek.

            “All gone quiet downstairs?” he asked her.

            “They’re settling down at least,” she said in a cheerful whisper. “Worn out, I expect.”

            “I hope you didn’t mind giving them a place to stay. I just couldn’t bring myself to tell them they’d got to go bunk at a tavern.”

            “Nonsense Sam. It’s only for the one night and I’m sure they’ve earned whatever hospitality they need.”

            “You’ve got a good heart,” said Vimes, muzzily. “A man’d be right lucky to have a wife like you.”

            Sybil chuckled. “And don’t you forget it, Sam Vimes. Come on.”

            She helped him climb to his feet and they made their way quietly towards the door.

            “I won’t,” said Vimes. “Gandalf says we’re all going to forget a lot come sunrise. But I won’t forget that. Not ever.”

            “You old softy,” said Sybil to her husband and gave his hand a squeeze. Then she yawned and she and Sir Samuel Vimes, his Grace the Duke of Ankh and Commander of the Watch went to get some well-earned rest.

**~**

            And all across the house and grounds the guests slipped, one by one, into a deep and forgetting sleep whilst above, the distant stars wheeled and glittered.

           

           

 

 

 

[1] A battered and much-cuddled copy of “Where’s My Cow? II, the Re-Cowabungance”


	24. Echoes and Homecomings

            Aragorn woke before dawn was in the sky. A pale mist hung over the hills like a veil and the stony ground was cold beneath him. He rose and wrapped himself the elven cloak given to him in Lothlórien. In his mind were the confused fragments of a strange dream, and he frowned at the lightening sky, for they troubled him. He remembered a fire on the hilltops, the noises of a great city, and rider all in white, yet he could make no sense of them. Shaking his head, he rose.

            Gimli was still deep in slumber, but Legolas stood gazing northwards into the darkness, thoughtful and silent as a young tree in a windless night.

            “They are far, far away,” he said sorrowfully, turning to Aragorn. “I know in my heart that they have not halted this night. Only an eagle could overtake them now.”

            “Nonetheless, we shall follow,” said Aragorn and though his words were grim, he laughed, a high fey sound in the lonely hills, and in his eyes there was a light that had not been there the day before. Stooping, he roused the dwarf.

            “Come,” he said. “Our scent grows cold!”

            “But it is still dark,” complained Gimli. “Even Legolas could not track in this murk.”

            “Where sight fails, the earth may bring us rumor,” chuckled Aragorn, and so saying he bent to place his ear to the ground.

            And for a while he lay there, the rumors of the earths and the remnants of his dream mixing and twining until he knew not which was which.

**~**

            “It’s time to go home,” announced Granny over breakfast in the common room of the little Quirmian roadhouse where the three of them were staying. She said it in the way you say, “My name is Tiffany.” Not with any particular emphasis, but with certainty. Nanny Ogg nodded.

            “I reckon you’re right, Esme,” she said. “I’m sure young Agnes and her young man have been keeping an eye on things but we’ve been gone long enough. I want to see how our Jason’s littlest is getting on.”

            “Is this the same littlest he had last time, or is this a new one?” asked Tiffany.

            “A new one,” said Nanny Ogg, with a wink. “You should stop by and meet him before you head back to the Chalk.”

            Tiffany nodded, unsurprised. In her experience, the Ogg clan seemed to multiply like field mice.

            “I will, Nanny,” she promised. “But I really can’t stay long.” The need in her own voice surprised her, as her mind filled with thoughts of the Chalk, the warm winds ruffling its short green turf and the buzzards screaming in the bright blue sky. “I want to go home.”

            Granny met Tiffany’s eyes and held them for a moment.

            “Yes, I imagines you do. I’d expect no less of you.”

            A little glow of pride filled Tiffany and she smiled at Granny Weatherwax. To her surprise, the older witch smiled back.

            “A witch needs her own place, her own land, her own story. Remember that, Tiffany. If you know where you come from, no matter who tries to stop you, you’ll get where you’re going.”

**~**

            I dare say it was getting on for eleven o’clock by the time I roused myself from my little cocoon of counterpane and prepared to face the day. The sun was shining merrily at me through the window and pigeons were cooing softly in the row of poplars across the way. Feeling pretty dashed _bon homonus_ (a French expression meaning bon homonus), I made the quotidian ablutions and dressed a languid sort of way, donning here a sock and there a shirt, until Jeeves rolled in with my tea and the morning paper.

            “Good morning, Jeeves,” I said.

            “Good morning, sir.”

            “Up early were you, Jeeves?” I inquired.

            “Fairly early, sir.”

            “Did you happen to note any snails on the wing or larks on the thorn, or rather the other way round?”

            “I fear I did not, sir.”

            “Funny. I thought you might have done on a day like this.”

            “Sir?”

            I saw that he wasn’t following what is known as my train of thought.

            “I am endeavoring to suggest, Jeeves, that today seems to me to be a good’un and that if ‘God’s in his heaven and all right with the world,’ I see no reason why the larks and snails should be slow in picking up their cues.”

            “Ah. I see, sir. It is possible that the conditions you have alluded to did indeed take place in a more rural part of the country.”

            “Not too many thorn bushes in central London, you mean?”

            “Just so, sir.”

            I conceded the justice of this and he biffed off to answer the telephone whilst I got down to brass tacks with the tea and news. A few moments later, however, he returned. His face was grave.

            “Yes, Jeeves?” I said.

            “I am sorry to report, sir,” said the honest fellow, “that I have just had a distressing conversation with Mr. Finknottle.”

            “Old Gussie?” I asked. “What’s eating him?”

            “It appears, sir, that his engagement is off.”

**~**

            I awoke with the unpleasant and vaguely gritty feeling that comes from not having slept in a bed. The reason for this was simple: I had not slept in a bed. For a moment I was unsure where I was. Then the mingled scents of dry paper, oiled leather, and several decades’ worth of dust reached my nose. I sat bolt upright and looked around me in a panic. I was in the Archives.

            I was in one of the little reading holes Fela had pointed out, seated at a round table. Before me lay my thieves’ lamp and a stack of books I’d meant to comb through for any reference to the Chandrian. I must have nodded off while leafing through the ‘Goode Childe’s Booke of Faerie Tales’, because it was still open to an illustration of a variety of ugly sprites in a field of giant daisies. I shut it quietly and placed in back atop the pile. Then, pulling Fela’s cloak down around my face and holding my thieves’ lamp in my left hand, I crept out of the reading hole and back to the tunnel that led to the Underthing. I made it through without incident and several heart-thudding minutes later, I stood in the little courtyard in the secret center of Mains.

            “Tehlu’s tits,” I swore softly. “It’s clear day out here.”

            How long had I been asleep in the Archives? Anyone could have found me: a scriv, Ambrose, even Lorren himself. I’d have faced expulsion at the very least. I’d been an idiot.

            “Kvothe?” called a soft voice from above me. I looked up to see Auri perched in the boughs of the apple tree. Her fair hair was almost invisible where the sunlight touched it.

            “Auri,” I said, dumbfounded. “You’re out. And it’s daytime.”

            “I know,” she said with a smile. “So are you. Aren’t we brave?”

**~**

            We walked into town with the morning’s light. It was a small place by Bucktown standards, a handful of homes and businesses of the sort that spring up around crossroads. Most of the buildings were thatched, save for the smithy and what looked to be an inn. Blue-grey smoke coiled from its chimney and I thought I smelled sausages cooking. I heard Nighteyes’ belly growl beside me.

            “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go taste some civilization.”

            Even this early, the inn, which called itself ‘The Silver Cow’, was bustling. A crew of wagoners, families, and caravan guards were respectively eating, packing, and trying to cure their hangovers. No one glanced twice at us, just a road weary poacher and his dog. I dipped into my rapidly thinning purse to buy sausages, fresh bread, apples, and a fried egg for me and sausages and bowl of water for Nighteyes. I even decided to tip the serving girl who brought us our food. She smiled a pretty, dimpled smile at me then made her way back to the kitchens, auburn curls bouncing. I scratched Nighteyes behind the ears as I spread butter on my bread.

            “We’ve been on the road too long, old fellow,” I said quietly. “Time to settle down some.”

            Nighteyes thumped his tail on the floor.

            _I knew you couldn’t be as foolish as you looked._

**~**

            Pooh was doing his stoutness exercises in front of the mirror one morning, with a jar of honey standing by in case he suddenly needed to sustain himself, when Piglet came hurrying in through their front door.

            “Pooh!” he cried.

            “Hold on,” said Pooh in a muffled voice, for he had just reached The Tricky Part, where he tried to touch his toes.

            “But Pooh!” said Piglet excitedly. “It’s…It’s…Come quick, Pooh! Come quick!”

            And he hurried out again. Pooh stopped his exercises and scratched his head in a puzzled sort of way.

            “Something has happened,” Pooh said to his reflection, who agreed. Then he went outside to find out what it was.

            Outside, Piglet was hopping up and down with excitement and pointing. And what he was pointing at was Christopher Robin.

            He was taller than Pooh remembered and a little scuffed around the edges, with shadows in his eyes that hadn’t been there when he left the forest. But he was still Christopher Robin. He laughed like a springtime stream and hoisted Piglet onto his shoulder and then caught up Pooh and spun him around before hugging him tight.

            “You’re back,” said Pooh, laughing and crying all at once. “You’ve come back!”

            “Silly old bear,” said Christopher Robin. “Didn’t I say I would?”

**~**

            In the warmth of the Waystone Inn, Chronicler blinked and set down his pen with sudden sharpness. He frowned critically at the page before him. It was blank. He turned it over to check the one beneath it. It too was blank. His frown deepened.

            “I’m sorry,” he said, “I was sure I’d filled these up. What was the last thing you said?”

            He looked up at the red-haired innkeeper expectantly. Kvothe blinked and gave his head a little shake.

            “I’m not sure. I thought…” His voice trailed off. “No, it’s gone.”

            “You were talking about Elodin, Reshi,” supplied Bast. “About how you wanted to study Naming.”

            Kvothe’s green eyes cleared. “Yes, of course. Thank-you Bast.”

            Chronicler flipped to the last half-finished page and picked up his pen again, ready to continue the tale.

**~**

            And at the end of all stories Azrael, who knew the secret, thought: I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN.


End file.
